How to rig an election (or save democracy)
But as the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, on a scale that might have prompted Huey Long’s stunned admiration. Tracing the sea changes in our electoral process, we see that two major events have paved the way for this lethal form of election manipulation: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability. This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the ability to verify election results. Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, which permits touchscreen machines and does not require a paper trail. Few Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines wou
