Just Because You're Paranoid

Just because you're paranoid
Doesn't mean they aren't really out to get you.
- American Proverb

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the simmering allegations of voting fraud in this year's presidential election. He scoffed at the people who are so quick to point to Diebold chairman Walden O'Dell's comment in a Republican fundraising letter he wrote in August 2003 that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

"Come on, an idle comment like that hardly proves anything," was my friend's argument. And he's right - I don't mean to contend that Mr. O'Dell's comment is ironclad proof of anything, except perhaps what a dumbass the guy is. It reminds me of a post-election personal interest story on NPR's Morning Edition this week. In it, an Ohio coffee-shop owner recounted the friendship that had formed between her and an out-of-state Democratic activist. She said she'd been coy about her political leanings, never admitting one way or the other to her partisan customer. She nearly didn't tell her even after the election (though she finally did - she voted Republican), all along saying she didn't think "it would be good for business." And she's probably right, especially considering how evenly split the country seems to be.

Now join me in fantasy land for a moment, and suppose that voting were done on plain slips of paper handed in at your local coffee shop, instead of at official state-run polling places. Would you vote at the coffee shop where the owner admitted she was herself a supporter of the Other Party? How about if you found out she'd promised to "deliver" her coffee shop's few hundred votes "to the President this year"? Can you imagine the outrage?

Back in the Real World - on the one hand we have a small-business owner who's afraid of losing maybe a dozen or two coffee drinkers, and so smart enough to keep her mouth shut. On the other hand we have the CEO of one of the biggest electronic voting machine manufacturers in the country, who's not. On the one hand, we have maybe a couple hundred dollars of coffee profit at stake, on the other we have our entire country's democracy.

Maybe he didn't really mean he'd use his company's position as a voting machine vendor to make sure Ohio went to Bush. Maybe it wasn't really a conflict of interest - but an apparent conflict is just as bad. What baffles me is why the hell any state bought anything from the guy's company again. Sure, Diebod backpedaled, but if it was me that was calling the shots buying new voting machines, that comment alone would have gotten them scratched off the list (not even considering the widespread concerns about the machines themselves). Maybe if he immediately stepped down, or was canned, they could be considered again. Maybe.