My little coda below about exit polls and the thirst for tales of a stolen election among the throngs of disappointed Kerry voters, of whom I am one, led to a little fracas in the comments. So here's my position, plain and simple, and maybe we can move on:
There's no question that the paper-trail-free, unaccountable, closed-source model of electronic voting is flawed, precisely because it leaves no room for after-the-fact authentication, and allows rumors and suspicions of skulduggery to ferment. We need to change that system. Salon, and particularly our reporter Farhad Manjoo, have been at the forefront of coverage of this issue since long before the current election.
When complaints of problems at the polls arise, it's the duty of responsible journalists, including us here at Salon, to take them seriously and try to evaluate them. If reported patterns of voting raise questions of any kind, that's worth looking into. Nothing is more important than assuring ourselves that our elections are won fairly.
But elections are messy exercised in democracy -- there's no such thing as a perfect one. There's always some conniving local official trying to win an edge for his side; the history of voter intimidation and voter-roll tweaking and political-machine tampering is endless. ("Vote early, vote often" was not a joke in Daley's Chicago, and most historians have concluded that in 1960 Kennedy probably won Illinois, and the White House, thanks to some deft ballot-box stuffing.)
The inevitability of problem precincts and questionable tallies is a given. They demand our inquiry nevertheless. But their presence does not, in and of itself, offer proof of electoral crookedness or a stolen election.
My beef is with the legions of outraged and aggrieved e-mail correspondents who are utterly convinced that the election was stolen. Why? They got an e-mail that told them! They read an article by Greg Palast! And they're not going to be satisfied by the work of some Salon reporter who went out and actually reviewed the evidence and talked to the participants. (Here's the most recent back and forth between Palast and Manjoo.)
There's a dynamic at work here that people really ought to be recognizing by now -- the "I have no idea if this is true, but I'll pass it on anyway" meme-propagation that the Internet so efficiently accelerates.
The worst case is that the more gullible and misinformed wing of the Democratic left will turn into our side's version of the gullible and misinformed legions of Republican voters who believe that Saddam had WMDs and worked with al-Qaida. We're not there yet, but if we keep going down this road of crying "fraud!" at the drop of a dubious e-mail tip, we're in for trouble.
We need to become smarter, more skeptical consumers of the information we get online. All the information, including -- no, especially -- the information that confirms our preconceptions and prejudices. If we (here at Salon, or in the blogosphere, or even on CBS or Fox!) find real evidence of the sort of significant voting problems that could affect the election's outcome, then I will join the charge. But I won't leap to the barricades on the basis of me-too forwards from people who are desperate to believe and unwilling to face facts.
The 2000 election, with its razor-thin margins, its rampant problems at the polls and its ultimate resolution by a partisan Supreme Court, left us all understandably hyped up on this issue. This battle should have been fought then, and wasn't. But 2004 turned out to be a different sort of disaster. We can close our eyes to that change and pretend it's still 2000, or we can look around at the landscape of reality and figure out what we have to do to pull our nation back from the brink of its current madness.
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