Forbes Op-Ed: Romney Family Investments Ties to Voting Machine Company That Could Decide the Election Causing Concern
Seriously, wait everyone. Calm the fuck down.
The op-ed is NOT accusing Tagg Romney of owning the voting machines. The op-ed is NOT accusing the Romney camp of intending to, or even considering, manipulating the vote.
The article IS saying that the connection stinks just badly enough to make people nervous, and that's a bad thing for the integrity of the vote, EVEN IF NO ONE DOES ANYTHING BAD.
I'm writing this here because comments might be closed on the Forbes article. And I want to get ahead of this before it starts getting (mis)reported all over my Facebook feed.
Did you read the whole thing?
Seriously?
Ah, fuck it.
This is my tl;dr version of what I got from the article.
1. Voting is sacred.
2. Voting machines have problems.
3. It's dumb for companies involved in the voting machine business to have even a hint of preference for one candidate over another. Even if there's no actual malfeasance, it helps the conspiracy theorizing and degrades the integrity of the process.
4. Voting machines should belong to the people.
If I missed something, I'm sorry. This is what I got from the article.
Some meta-comments on the critiques:
1. On replying to comments/questions about the form
Look - the author is an adult and a professional, and therefore has a thick enough skin to deal with all the criticism heaped at him. He also hopefully has a thick enough skin to deal with the fact that a lot of people don't read articles before they comment on them.
The fact that he has commented on a lot of posts -- I have the dubious distinction of claiming to have read the article AND 14 pages of comments of varying quality and relevance -- shows that he at least enjoys the back-and-forth, and, like any writer, cares about what he has written, and will defend its scope and its content against misappropriation.
I could speculate whether a more creative approach means that the author feels more attached to it than a more boring news piece, or even an opinion article, but I probably would (rightly) get my head bit off for speculating without info and projecting my own attitudes toward writing.
2. On partisanship lenses
Perhaps relevant, perhaps not, but the NYTimes had an interesting report about research in partisanship. Thanks go to Evolutionary Politics FB group for highlighting this.
Again, for the tl;dr crowd:
People actually become more moderate when they are forced to explain a policy - the how of a policy. So, if the goal is to actually have a conversation across ideological divides, then we should focus on how a policy could be good/bad, and not just stick with defending or attacking X.
The Forbes author did this. The author has told a story about what could happen, something that would be very bad for the country, no matter who won. Nevermind the Democratic lean of the youth vote - if elections are perceived as fraudulent, then the alleged disengagement of my generation will get even worse -- and it won't be limited to the young.
I don't know - perhaps the style of the piece caused people to project things into it that weren't there. If it fails on style but succeeds in content, I trust the author to be non-defensive enough to accept constructive criticism.
The whole process has made me, and many I know, a bit frazzled. So let's calm down a bit and think about how even a hint of impropriety is bad. Bill Clinton probably doesn't even walk around in a block radius of a strip club. Why? Because it'd be bad for any prominent politician, but it'd be really bad for Bill Clinton.
Similarly, it's bad enough with the existing problems of voting machines. It gets worse when the optics of donations and connections with Tagg Romney are added. And, intended or not, the back-and-forth about the latter may inhibit the work to fix the former.
If I were really tin-foil inclined, I'd say THIS is the reason they did it - to take the heat off design/implementation problems of their products. ;)
3. Maybe the problem is that this appears in Forbes
I had a subscription to Forbes for a couple years. I ended up not renewing because I assumed, I think correctly, that I was more liberal than the general bent of the magazine.
I was therefore very surprised to see Forbes running with this story, even though the author's claim is NOT - for Pete's sake, read the article folks! - that Tagg Romney owns the voting machines, nor that there is any specific reason to suspect the Romney campaign of manipulating the vote.
If Forbes is right-of-center, or right, then maybe people feel betrayed that their "safe zone" is being violated. Attacks are extra vitriolic because they weren't expected. Maybe I'd feel the same way if I read a Hannity piece in Mother Jones.
Or maybe, people just like to fight and complain.
Epilogue:
I was searching for this story, and yes, this was the first major outlet that carried it in one form or another.
For what it's worth, I thought it was important enough to comment that I bothered registering. When email registration flaked out - not sure why - I signed up using my FB account. I have never (intentionally) used my FB account to sign up for a social reader.
I couldn't post my comment using Chrome. So I had to transfer my comment boot up my creaky IE7. That didn't work. I concluded that comments were closed, or my computer was jacked up, or a divine power just didn't want me to be posting this at 4am.
Anyway, not sure why anyone should care, but I really cared about writing this comment.
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