Assassination by ballot-box

[ngant17]

The art and science of a bloodless regime-change: Assassination by ballot-box.

With the increase in the complexity of organizing a coup, there may be a consensus among the would-be plotters that well-orchestrated executions of the public officers in the opposition are not absolutely necessary or desirable. Even the best of plans go awry. Sooner or later, a gaping hole of discrepancies and lies becomes exposed in the subsequent investigations, most of which are done is spite of the official conclusions. Thus, public confidence quickly erodes the facade of the democratic process, it weakens that bastion of stability in their maintenance of political power over the masses.

For a coup d'etat of convenience, one only needs to control the machinery which is used to count the votes.

For over a century, since the 1890's to our present day, mechanical tabulators have proven to be so consistently accurate and so resilient to error that no one would have dared to try and manipulate the democratic process this way. Yet with the great debacles of the Nov. 2000 elections and beyond, it yielded enough negative publicity in the operation of the tabulators, the punch-card machines and the paper chads, that the plotters now found a timely excuse to do away with them in most states. Rather than attempt to examine the real problems for the failure of the democratic process, the tabulators became the patsy and fall-guy, blamed by Congress, and those innocent machines were condemned as technologically obsolete and are now being consigned to the graveyard of nostalgia.

In their places arose a new and menacing dinosaur: the transistorized computer. The beast was omnipotent and its prey was completely helpless. It devoured all their apprehensions in one instant. No traces or evidence of its vicious gorging of votes would ever appear, the paper was all consumed electronically and nary a drop of blood would ever be left to attest to its rapacious gluttony of stolen votes.

The monster is conscious of any attempt to control it from afar. It allows no fetters to bound itself before public scrutiny. It roams freely in the jungles of corporate law, it sleeps in those comfortable lairs and the beast emerges only when its belly rumbles and becomes empty again, to feed once more off the teeming votes which the public innocently supplies for it every 2 years.

We can tackle this vote-dragon. No, it can't be slain outright but it must be driven from the villages of the public precinct. Why so? Because if its life in the public elections is ever going to be tolerated, because if it simply is going to be shackled for the sake of the public's amusement, to try and control it with open-source software and embedded hardware, to make it behave like it was only a penguin in a suit, then we will face its vengeance again. It will soon grow back into a King Kong, it will burst free from those little chains, no matter how strong the links are made. The reason is that the beast has a super-complex mind of its own. It operates only according to the laws of physics, which is not at all democratic. It continues to evolve every new day and no one person can grasp the whole of it. It does not want to be controlled, that is its inherent nature, whether it is in open-source or proprietary code, it matters little to the nature of this beast. Let it roam somewhere, but not in the domain of a democratic election.