Property Rights Fanatics vs. Election Integrity

Tuesday's Chronicle had an article with a headline I found a little puzzling: Paper trail law for e-voting has fans, foes. Who, I wondered, would oppose efforts to keep electronic voting honest?

I got my answer in the second graph: the Pacific Legal Foundation.

The Chron article describes them as 'property rights' advocates, but that's a little euphemistic. The Pacific Legal Foundation's guiding principle is a complete inversion of morality: everything we stand for (environmental protection, equal rights, public education, etc.) is a crime against the sacred rights of property owners. A list of their current initiatives tells the story: "Coastal Land Rights Project", "Program for Choice and Innovation in Education", "Race and Sex Preference Abolition", "Rent Control Project", and so on.

Worse, they have mastered the art of making extremism sound reasonable, and they are very adept at getting themselves face time in the media.

In the matter of paper trails for electronic voting, they try (and fail) to rationalize their position. For example:

"We're moving in the wrong direction,'' said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies for the institute. "The whole point of e-voting is to move away from paper."

Sorry, but moving away from paper is not an end in itself. The point of moving away from paper is supposed to be greater accuracy and confidence in the results...which we don't get without a paper trail.

Or here:

"Passing sweeping laws ... to require voter-verified paper trails for touch-screen machines, though well-intentioned, could bankrupt cash-strapped counties and may erode the efficiency of electronic voting management,'' they said in the paper.

Such touching concern for the fiscal health of California's counties...which they are intent on keeping bankrupt with their opposition to taxes.

Or here:

"These same people worried about electronic voting machines are perfectly fine using an ATM machine or being in an airplane that uses computers for everything,'' Arrison said.

It's just too obvious...but I'll say it anyway: ATM machines provide a paper trail, you idiot. Put it another way: would you trust an ATM machine that had no mechanism of verification whatsoever? If you had no way at all of verifying that your deposits were credited to your account, or that the money debited was no more than what you withdrew?

But the big question they didn't even try to answer was: what the hell does any of this have to do with 'property rights'?

I don't see a direct connection, and the only indirect connection--undermining the integrity of elections helps Republicans, which advances their agenda--is a little more tinfoil-hattish than I like.

But, you know, if the tinfoil hat fits...

[That's all, folks]