Online Journal: Debunking the Debunker

Elections & Voting
Debunking the debunker
By Ernest Partridge
Online Journal Guest Writer


Jun 9, 2006, 00:36

Complication of the election integrity issue works to the advantage of the status quo; which is to say, the increasing use of paperless, unauditable direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. More complications abound as critics of the status quo attempt to prove that past, and presumably future, elections were and will be fraudulent.

In fact, the controversy can be reduced to two simple questions:

1. Can defenders of the status quo prove that the 2004 (and also the 2000 and 2002) elections were fair and accurate?

2. Can defenders of the status quo refute the critics?

The answer to the first question is simple and straightforward: they cannot, because the DREs (and also the central compiling computers) were designed to exclude proof. The software is secret, and thus closed to inspection and validation, and there is no independent record of the votes against which the totals can be verified. (Running the same computations again is not a “recount.”) Moreover, computer experts have found, and demonstrated, numerous “holes” in the machines through which voting totals can be finagled, and reports of still more flaws continue to come in.

>snip

Regarding the second question, every now and then an attempt is made to refute the critics. The most recent of note was published last Friday in Salon.com, and was written by Farhad Manjoo, who has made something of a career out of debunking the critics. Whenever an important critique of the electoral status quo is published, by John Conyers’ committee, by Mark Crispin Miller, or most recently by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., we can generally count on a rebuttal by Manjoo. Last week, he did not disappoint us.

Manjoo’s latest was a pathetically weak piece of work which, due to its flaws, only serves to strengthen the case of its target, the RFK article. Or so I shall argue in the remainder of this essay.

>more

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_889.shtml

Problem is, that framing of the controversy has nothing to do with the article RFK actually wrote. Manjoo isn't even a "defender() of the status quo." And while Partridge might like to believe that RFK's article focused attention on the vulnerabilities of DREs, clearly it doesn't.

Defining any and every fraud argument as an "important critique of the electoral status quo," and every critique thereof as an attempt to defend the status quo, may seem like very clever framing. Well, good luck with that.