As many people went out to vote yesterday, some people voted on a paper ballot, others used a touch screen computer and others sent in their absentee ballots. But just because you voted does not mean that your vote was actually counted, especially for those people using computers.
In fact, as people began early voting, it was discovered in West Virginia, that the machines were flipping votes to other candidates. These machines must be calibrated correctly in order to function properly. But if someone were to hit the top person, and the machine picks a candidate three or four down from that person, that is not a calibration problem; this is a problem with the actual software designed to count the votes.
In Davidson County, Tennessee, Patricia Earnhardt continually tried hitting the “Obama” button on the machine, but it would not register. After a while she said she had the poll worker help her, who tried hitting it a couple times, and it lit up Green Party Candidate Cynthia McKinney. The poll worker cancelled the vote, but Patricia continued to have trouble with the machine, and left the voter booth very uncertain of how her vote turned out.
It is amazing how much faith people place into the voting machines and voting process. It seems like it would be very simple for these machines to be tampered with in one way or another to determine an election. There are people who claim to know the secret of how to hack these machines. In fact, only one machine needs to be hacked: the one that tallies up the votes from all other machines. Simply tell that machine what numbers you are looking for and you are all set.
People barely trust each other, yet when someone walks away from that voting booth, they are convinced that they have cast a ballot for candidate A or candidate B. Perhaps that was not the case. Perhaps, these things are already decided for us. Forget about democracy being taken away if you vote for the wrong person.
Perhaps your vote doesn’t even matter, and democracy was already taken away, or at the very least, tampered with. As many Marquette students went and voted yesterday, one can only wonder what happened to the vote once you left the voting booth.
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