Honest Voting

Championing free, honest, and accurate elections is like taking a principled stand in favor of Mom and apple pie.  Who would want to come out against fair elections?  You might as well declare yourself a fancier of child pornography.

As I type this I’m watching Start the Revolution Without Me, that classic costume farce with Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder playing French aristocrat and peasant twins mixed and switched at birth.  The scene that just finished was the elegant Dance of Note-Passing, where the nobility at the ball gradually abandon the pretence of dancing as they exchange scrawled requests for sex and assassination.  Eventually the floor is littered with historical Post-Its.  There’s so much evidence of intrigue that the dancers ignore everything that doesn’t affect them directly until someone forgets himelf and openly shouts his death threat. Even then the crowd politely ignores his outburst until the offender quietly leaves the room.

This is far closer a metaphor for the current state of elections than I expected when I casually turned on the television.

People around the world have put a lot of thought into making elections speedy, well-publicized…and favorable for their party.   What you’ll read about here is ways that concerned citizens attempt to keep election results aboveboard, alternating with tales of citizens with other concerns who attempt to torque those results in their direction.

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