Sunday, December 07, 2003

Great News From the Voting Front

What an exciting year 2004 will be! I am going to vote! Yes, Echidne of the snakes, a goddess of no known domicile, is going to cast her first ever vote for the president of the United States!

This will require voter fraud, but that's doable. The United States has a long history of voter fraud. A New York City election in 1844 had 135 percent of the eligible voters turn out. One additional goddess-vote is chickenfeed compared to that.

It is also chickenfeed compared to what happened in Boone County, Indiana, where the e-vote machines counted a total of 144,000 cast votes. From around 19,000 registered voters.

So what with actual human voter fraud and all the problems I can foresee with the e-vote machines that leave no paper trail behind, nobody is going to waste time or money looking for one criminal goddess.

This is how I can become a voter: I found out that illegal aliens and permanent residents in the United States sometimes do vote, because the federal law doesn't require the voters to prove their identities, and the current practise is not to inquire after the eager voter's citizenship status. I'm very excited about this. Imagine: I'm going to experience the American democracy in person, I'm going to affect world events directly!

Well, not much, of course. One vote doesn't matter very much. But it's the principle that counts here. We should all be as involved in democracy as Walden O'Dell. Not only is he a major fundraiser for the Republican party, but he is also the CEO of Diebold, a firm that produces many of the e-mail machines that will be used in the 2004 elections. Walden has gotten a lot of undeserved flack for supposedly saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

So what do these critics want? First they complain about the inertia of the average American who rarely bothers to step into the voting booth. Then when someone throws himself whole-heartedly into voting, they don't like that either. Sheesh.

I'm with Walden on this one.