By Teresa A. Martin
Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog left me with a sort of squirmy feeling inside.
The movie was a black comedy that mated a frustrated and fading Hollywood producer to a political machine in need of driving public opinion for a president in trouble. The result was a completely manufactured war that quickly blurred the line between fiction and reality.
His new film, Man of the Year, has a happy ending but a left me with some of the same squirminess. Returning to a political plotline, this movie stars Robin Williams as a talk show host who runs for president on a whim and through a glitch in the electronic voting system is elected. Oh, and along the way a whistle blower almost becomes a victim in the name of holy corporate profits.
With election week upon us next week, both these movies have been hovering around my brain. Politics are an expression of us – in our most noble and our most greedy. Levinson creates fiction that scares me more than a thousand Chuckies combined because, well, the events could almost be real. Or could they?
That’s black humor after all, creating laughter in a sense of discomfort and displacement, with that little nagging voice at the back of you brain asking what’s really so funny about this anyway.
Black humor provides a way to take on topics like digital voting. The notion of digital voting has been around almost since the dawn of the first Internet bloom. Needless to say, the initial reaction was FUD: Fear, Uncertainly, and Doubt. And lots of it.
But as time passed, more and more of us starting sending credit card data digitally, banking online, and just using all things virtually without much of a second thought. And then came the 2000 elections ... I mean really, how much worse could digital voting be than the ‘hanging chads’ or other dubious episodes of that season?
Touch-screen voting machines quickly became a hot market. The US Congress authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the way we vote. And lots of those dollars when to purchasing those once-scary digital voting machines. Companies like ATM maker Diebold created divisions and acquired companies in order to compete in this market.
Publisher Ziff-Davis says that next week 2 out of 5 voters will use a digital voting machine to cast their preference. This isn’t some passing fad. And this isn't fiction.
But, but ... I'm not afraid of digital voting yet a little healthy paranoia might be in order. Maybe we shouldn't listen to corporate PR quite so quickly. Let's visit Rolling Stone Magazine for a few moments and read a few of the ‘oops’ moments it reports this month:
Just because it is digital, doesn’t mean it is fool proof, tamper proof, and goof proof.
One of the biggest issues of digital voting is the lack of paper trail. As any of us who have worked with numbers, computers, and lots of data know from painful experience, a paper back up can be a Very Good Thing.
If nothing else, a paper trail provides a backup of information, an alternative record, and something to provide a stake in the ground to show that two sources, paper and electronic, show the same thing. And in something as critical as an election, why shouldn’t we demand backups? Why should double-checking be a dirty word?
Interestingly, the four vendors of these systems, Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic all claim no backups are needed. They all spout near-identical commentary on the safeness and bug-proofness of their respective systems.
Stop and think about it for a moment. Isn't it amazing that these four companies have done what no one else has been able to do! They have each created a hacker proof system. And one that is so perfectly coded it has no bugs. And so robustly designed that it accounts for any and all situations it might encounter and ensures it will handle them all seamlessly. Why aren’t they building the machine in my office?!?!?!?
HBO is getting heat this week for producing a documentary called Hacking Democracy, which looks at digital voting. It explores a Princeton study from September that identifies potential issues in the Diebold system. Diebold’s reaction was to stomp its corporate boots loudly and demand that the show be cancelled. Hmm. Sounds kinda draconian, but then again, profits matter a lot.
The punch line of Wag the Dog was this: perception becomes reality. Chillingly close to the truth. The punchline of Man of the Year was this: reality can be manufactured by a bug in the system. What if this not quite as fictional as we’d like to believe?
Remember, Election Day is Tuesday November 7. Don't let concerns about the voting process stop you from being there! Your vote -- and showing up to make that vote -- counts. That's the only way we can keep shaping our own reality.
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