Electronic voting has been a hot-button topic for years, with advocates going head-to-head against opponents on talk radio and the internet and even in the mainstream media. Every four years, as a presidential election looms just over the horizon, the subject is dusted off and addressed yet again. As we are less than a month away from the most important election in American history, I began to wonder just what might happen if our election process were made fully electronic. While we are relatively low-tech in our voting systems as of this writing, advocates of electronic voting would like to pull out the stops and take us as far as internet voting.
Let’s face the facts, despite butterfly ballot confusions and hanging chads, our current system has the virtue of being more subject to incompetence than outright disruption through fraud. Short of burning down a polling place and all the votes cast within it, there is little danger of a foreign power or terrorist making more of a mess of our voting process than it is normally. While I agree that we need to streamline the entire concept of voting in this country to take advantage of such advances as instant global electronic communication, I also worry about the old adage that warns us about complex drains and stopped up plumbing. “Keep It Simple Stupid” is something that is drilled into you when you study computer programming. Yet simplicity and government rarely, if ever, share the same bed.
Internet voting would offer many advantages. The very term “voter turnout” would be rendered nonsensical since anyone with a PC, tablet or Smartphone could literally phone in their vote. We’d need a new description to replace it, say, “voter participation”. Or maybe just “Likes”… I’m flexible. Imagine reading that a candidate received 52% of Likes in a future election. We could very well be headed down this path. But where does this meandering path lead? For certain, the average of voter intelligence would drop in favor of larger participants.
The concerns for such voting methods are several, security being the key. Facebook, backed by George Soros, is an excellent example of an emerging technological communications trend that hasn’t been known for it’s successes in keeping our personal data private. Internet voting will need to be far more secure. It will need to be both anonymous from the viewpoint of counting ballots and secure in its ability to ensure one vote per eligible citizen. The opportunity for fraud is so enormous that the technology has remained on the drawing boards for many years, stalled by these unaddressed concerns. Yet we trust our banking, shopping and even our drivers’ licenses to this technology, so why not voting? Voting is important yet mired in complications such as schools being closed down to provide polling places,weather keeping turnout down, and even jack-booted thugs scaring people away from the polls in the name of freedom from intimidation. Internet voting is touted as a solution to all this, and more.
Paramount to any secured internet voting proposal is a method to ensure that you, a legal voter, and only you can cast your vote. And it should go without saying that one vote per customer is the law of the land. How can any system ensure that 100% of the time this will be the case? A case in point: electronic time and attendance websites. Every workday I use such a system to clock in and out, and yet I can accidentally clock in twice or clock out without ever clocking in. If someone refreshes my web browser page by hitting the back button, they can duplicate my punch. These sorts of issues must never occur if internet voting is to be a viable alternative to the existing system. The system must be foolproof and hack proof.
One solution is already, literally, at hand. Some laptops and Smartphones include (or are considering adding) the capability of biometrically reading the authorized user’s fingerprint. With the advent of cheap biometric reader technology as stock equipment in such devices, we are a step closer. Yet hackers have never been far behind any technological advance, and voting is a huge deal. No security is invulnerable. Biometrics get us close, but perhaps not close enough for government work, pardon the pun. For real security, we must look to the favorite emergent technology of globalists: RFID.
There is already a call for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips to be implanted conveniently in our flesh. Advocates tell us that an embedded chip is the ultimate in security. With no voter ID card to lose or have stolen, a citizen needs only step up to an internet-enabled device and access the voting website to cast their vote. True democracy, they tell us, is voting on all issues all of the time by cutting out the middleman. While this may seem rational to some, even desirable, consider the avenues for abuse. We worry about voter fraud with the dead voting now, just imagine if you needed an imbedded chip to cast your vote. I’m picturing a rash of grave-robbers bashing open coffins in search of votes. Just what we need – one more thing to remember to do when preparing for our funerals – instructions to have your next of kin deactivate or remove your chip.
But imagine that the voting system, riding on the backbone of the internet, is disrupted or hijacked by foreign or domestic agents with the purpose to create a crisis. We all remember the lengthy legal turmoil following the last two elections and accusations of voting fraud. Multiply that chaos by orders of magnitude if a terrorist organization claimed to have hijacked the voting system. Hundreds, thousands or millions of votes could be changed, distorted or erased. Imagine the pandemonium that would ensue as voters questioned whether their votes had been counted. No president could assume the office in such an environment. A special election would need to be organized in quick order and held immediately. Yet the seed of doubt would remain; did the people’s votes count once, twice or at all?
Could such a future be close at hand? More disturbing yet, is such a future planned, complete with the negative aspects crafted to be used to fulfill an agenda? Is this the method that will be used to remove the constitutional rights of American citizens to choose their elected officials? Internet voting may be implemented with all the forethought that government is known for. It falls on the citizenry to be aware of the potential technological threats to society and use our freedom of speech to make our voices heard in government.
Technology is not going away, yet the speed at which it is being implemented is leaving society flat footed in trying to adjust its laws accordingly. It’s this inherent nature that is being deliberately exploited by globalists, leftists and New World Order proponents to advance their agenda at breakneck speed. They know all too well that rational people would raise objections to many of the technological advances being foisted upon them as an intrusion into their privacy and a threat to their freedoms. But when such “advances” are coming faster than people can think out the consequences, we’re on a slippery slope toward a future we may not intend.
Eric Cornett
Writer/Photographer/Graphic Artist
Eric is a writer and professional photographer in charge of the Right Side News graphic design projects.