A Mommy Story

Please excuse the interruption in our normal schedule of cute Cordy pics and whining about morning sickness for this public service announcement.

We’re less than a month from Election Day here in the US, and I hope everyone is thinking about voting this year. Lots of important local and national issues and government seats are up for consideration, and your vote could change the entire direction of the country.

When I was younger I was a much less regular voter. Who cares about the local school levy and city council seats, I figured. I didn’t think they impacted me at all – after all, I was a renter, so I didn’t pay property tax, and the city council certainly never seemed to do anything that noticeably impacted me. Sure, I’d always show up to the polls on presidential election years, but otherwise it was too big of a hassle.

As a “responsible adult” now (wow, that was hard to even write), I am more concerned with voting. I have a child, I own a house, and I care about the direction my neighborhood and my city is heading. A school levy is now almost as important as making the choice for president.

If you are not a registered voter, make sure you get registered soon. If you are a registered voter, look up where your polling station is, and make decisions about when you plan to go vote. If you know you’ll be busy, make plans to vote absentee.

Here in Ohio, I’m actually a little nervous of voting on Election Day. You see, Ohio has these wonderful electronic machines designed to make voting so much easier for all of us who can’t operate a punch card. They’re made by Diebold (where the president of the company is a die-hard Republican who promised he’d win the election for Bush in 2004), and they are a touch screen system. Simply touch the names of your choices, hit confirm, and voila – your votes are cast into the electronic ether!

Now, anyone who has had a post eaten by Blogger can tell you that electronics can fail. Did your vote really go through? Was it really recorded? There is no paper trail for these machines, so there is no confirmation that your vote was submitted, or recorded properly.

Then there’s the small issue of hackers. Oh sure, we’d like to think that no one out there would want to do anything to forcibly change the outcome of an election, but let’s be honest: lots of people would give their left arm to force an issue their direction, even if it is not what the majority wants. That’s why after reading this report by Princeton University, I’m even more nervous about using these machines. It seems that an amateur hacker, given access to a machine for less than a minute (which is easy to do behind the little curtain), can easily insert malicious code into the system to change the logs and voting outcome. Even worse, that same hacker can nearly as easily install a virus that can silently affect all the machines at once. A simple computer virus could steal votes without detection.

So if you’re in Ohio, or any other state using these machines, I urge you to consider voting absentee. Absentee voting has a paper trail, and has to be hand counted, so you know your vote will count. We also need to tell our state governments that these machines, in their current vulnerable state, are not acceptable voting devices, and demand that they either make the needed security changes to protect the votes, or fall back on another system.

And I’m not trying to say that because the Diebold CEO is a die-hard Republican that Republicans are trying to steal votes. The truth is, anyone can hack these machines.

So get registered, get educated on the issues affecting you, and go vote, one way or another. Maybe this year we can get the national voter turnout higher than 35% to find out what people really do want for this country.

—————

This PSA was paid for by the “If you don’t vote, you can’t bitch about the government” committee of A Mommy Story.