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GAMING ELECTIONS. Researchers have again successfully broken into computerized election systems, this time in California and in Florida. The exercises show that most of the commonly used machines have problems and that it is easy to alter vote totals or to reassign votes. The bill sponsored by Rush D. Holt in the House is not a complete solution to these problems. It requires a paper trail for each vote, true, but it also gives most states until 2012 to upgrade their systems. What to do until then? Presumably we are to hope that nobody will take advantage of those weaknesses in the systems.Hendrik Hertzberg writes about a different kind of election gaming in a recent New Yorker article. A snippet:
Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California's electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn't get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union.Democrats in North Carolina have a similar proposal, though with smaller benefits for the Democratic Party. Such proposals are not illegal or even unethical. They might even make sense on some level. But their most likely purpose is to get one party or the other short-term gaming gains.
-- J. Goodrich