DIEBOLD IN THE MONKEY HOUSE

I've just watched a video of a chimpanzee named Baxter hacking a Diebold voting machine, by deleting its audit log with a few keystrokes.

Well, why not.

In 1961 Ham The Chimp -- stimulated by colored light cues, sound prompts, and electric shocks to his lower extremities -- masterminded dozens of perfectly timed lever pulls as he rocketed into space, proving that Intelligent Design is a process of Evolution.

I've no doubt that Ham's leveraging had little effect on the flight's dynamics, but it did prep us for the premise, 45 years later, that if apes can fly -- they can fix elections.

Baxter's deft manipulations were staged for the camera as a wry rebuttal to the position held by Diebold, that "no human could alter the results" tallied by their voting machines. Fair enough, and no human did, when Baxter the simian did it, and without first having his feet zapped in zero gravity.

I hate to break it to you, dear dedicated readers, but we've reached the outer limits of democracy.

Voting machines can be easily corrupted, then prompted to erase all traces of their corruption when the deed is done. And, without a paper trail, nothing can be proven. The computer software is secretly coded, and we’re not allowed to see how it does what it does. Votes are counted well away from the electorate and the media.

Machines are controlling other machines, and their master “vendors" have heavily underwritten this or that candidate beforehand. Poll tapes vanish. Oversight is overlooked. Polling stations and voter registrations are disparate, (depending on your pocketbook and pigmentation) and accountability is as rare as a monkey's Uncle Sam.

We've become a nation of Hams in space – pulling electoral levers connected neither to our flight path ballots or their splashdown tallies, because the mission has already been pre-accomplished.

When “vote early and often” becomes a free & fair survival method and no longer a joke, only a humorist can get us out of this, and my solution is in three parts:

1. Bring back paper ballots, exclusively. Period. No scanners, no disks, no computers, no software. If it needs a battery or a wall plug, it’s out. We'll have cardboard ballot boxes, paper ballots and wooden pencils. Diebold can make the boxes, sharpen the pencils, and all Diebold employees, when working within fifty feet of a polling station, must wear musical propellor beanies.

2. In lieu of Election Day, let’s have an Election Month. Voting begins November 1st, ends on Thanksgiving, and polls will remain open 24/7. Poll workers and election officials will all be volunteers.

They will also all be convicts.

Well, why not an organized, close-knit, captive coterie with nothing to lose? Cheap labor, closely supervised and well-motivated. But, no violent crime offenders. Too messy. We want savvy high-level political and religious cons, (plenty to choose from, with more arriving daily) and ex-corporate hucksters well-versed in shuffling paper.

3. Lastly, the ballots and boxes will all be color-coded, and after they're collected, turned over to Primate vote counters. Chimpanzees preferred. They'll bring a fine tradition of singular, impartial purpose to the task. From Bonzo to Ham to Baxter to the Red Rose Tea hepcats – they’ll come well-heeled (and shocked) in rote reporting.

As the Scopes of practice go, so goes the nation, and they couldn't elect any worse than Diebold.

Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.