I have been thinking about the problem of politically rigged computers ever since 1980.
I was first tipped off to this problem by a highly skilled computer programmer. He told me that he could program a computer program that would be used to count the votes in local elections. He said he could program the outcome of the voting. He insisted that this would not be easily discovered. I believed him.
Not long afterwards, I read a book by Adam Osborne, who invented the ill-fated Osborne portable computer: Running Wild (1979). In that book, he warned against two areas of computer technology that could lead to disasters. One of them had to do with interbank transfers of data. He thought the programs could be rigged to favor the siphoning off of large amounts of money by means of tiny amounts in individual transactions. He said that this would not be identifiable. The other area was digitized voting. He said that it would be too easy to rig the computers to elect someone who in fact did not get the most votes.
Here is testimony under oath by a computer programmer who said that he wrote such a program that was used in an election.
In close elections, this is the kind of programming that could be used to steal the election.
WHY I DON'T WORRY ABOUT THIS
While I understand the threat, it does not worry me. That is because the political system today is so gridlocked, and the political parties today are so committed to the welfare and warfare state, that the outcome of any specific election has marginal results.
Furthermore, the basis of the public's faith in the democratic system has never rested strongly on the absence of corruption and rigging. Probably the most famous election that was clearly rigged was Lyndon Johnson's 1948 victory in the Senate race in Texas. He won in the primary, which in those days meant he would win in the statewide election. He won because of a small precinct in South Texas in which the voters' names appeared in the records in alphabetical order. He won the election by 68 votes. His victory was upheld by a state commission on a vote of 29 to 28. This story was first revealed to the general public in the 1964 paperback book by Texas historian J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon. The book was of course dismissed as a pack of lies by supporters of Johnson in the presidential election. In 1980, Robert Caro published the first volume of his multi-volume biography of Johnson. It went into the details of how the election was stolen. It was stolen exactly as Haley had said in 1964. You can read about it in The New York Times.
Johnson became the most powerful Senate majority leader in history. Then he became President of the United States. But did this fundamentally change America? To say that it did means that the political alignment in the United States was such that only Lyndon Johnson could have produced the results. It would be hard for any historian to prove that this was the case. It may conceivably have been the case, especially with respect to the escalation of the war in Vietnam, but that escalation was the product of John F. Kennedy's original decision to send American military advisers to South Vietnam, and his subsequent decisions to increase the commitment of troops. The war in Vietnam did not start with Lyndon Johnson. It started with John F. Kennedy.
The American election system has always been subjected to rigging. The public really has never cared much. Close elections have never been decided retroactively based on court cases that have shown that particular counties voted in a particular way because of corruption. I think the best example was the victory of Kennedy in Cook County, Illinois, in 1960. Nixon decided not to protest it. He said later that he did not want to divide the country. Whatever his reason, he refused to take the results into the courts.
I don't think there is any question that Ron Paul's defeat in the November election of 1976 was stolen by voters from Barbara Jordan's contiguous district who crossed into Ron Paul's district to vote for his opponent. He lost by 268 votes out of about 180,000. He lost his office for one term, and I left Washington forever. The election results unquestionably affected my life more than they affected his life. But they had no effect on the direction the country was moving politically.
POLITICAL LEGITIMACY
Democracy is accepted by voters because it has legitimacy in their minds. But most voters really don't care that much about election results, even in close elections. Losing voters shrug their shoulders, and then they move on. They don't want the disruptions associated with endless debates over rigged elections. They want to move on with their lives. They want to believe that the system is generally legitimate, but they don't pay that much attention to the possibility that the system is rigged. They don't look too closely at the system. They don't want to lose their faith in the system. They just want peace of mind regarding the avoidance of some kind of perpetual civil war as a result of rigged elections. Americans went through that in 1860. Even so, nobody argued in 1860 that the presidential election had been rigged. Secessionists just didn't like the results.
We live in a bipartisan system that is not really bipartisan. It is essentially one political party with two wings. It is presently in gridlock. A similar gridlock is affecting Western Europe.
The main economic threat facing the West today is this: the unfunded liabilities of the governments' retirement programs and the health care programs for retirees. This system is the product of bipartisanship over a period of at least 50 years in the United States. It has been going on even longer in Western Europe. With or without election rigging, the politicians have built this welfare state system. The system would not be fundamentally different if every election had been as pure as driven snow. The ideology of the welfare state is morally corrupt. The election system is a lot less corrupt than the ideology of the two political parties to benefit from the election system. This is why I don't worry much about rigged elections. The corruption extends far more deeply than rigged elections.
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