Mortaine’s Blog

Monkeys determine fate of the United States. Banana subsidies get instantaneous approval.

Some monkeys are…. what?

Even if the system could be hacked, he said, it could only be done by a person with “unfettered access to the system.” Bear noted that elections are not just the machines, but also the people who work the elections.

[Bear speaks on behalf of Diebold.]

OK, so I work the elections. The volunteers who work them with me meet the following criteria:
Not working during the day.
Willing to be paid $3.75/hour for a 16 hour day, no overtime.
Have no real accountability past the day of the election.

We get a lot of retirees. We get a few unemployed. We get a few like me who do it for their civic conscience (I don’t get called for jury duty, and feel this is my penance). We also get city/county employees, who get paid their regular salaries if they wish to man the polls on election day instead of their usual duties.

But we’re basically talking about people who don’t have any consequences for what happens that day, and don’t get paid enough to stay really honest.

It’s not that I don’t believe that election workers are honest. I do– I’m one of them, and I know we’re honest. BUT I also have the same belief about election workers as I do about TSA baggage handlers– these are not saints. You cannot put a temptation in front of them and expect all of them to ignore it. What’s more, a lot of election workers *are* politically aware and active, and may in fact have their own personal very strong beliefs about how the election should turn out.

I believe that I would not tamper with the election, given access, ability, and a sufficient lack of oversight to get away with it. But am I certain? Would anyone with a sufficient investment in the election results be completely temptation-free, confronted with that kind of opportunity?

I guess my point is: let’s not find out. Seriously; if your system relies on humans being 100% honest and infallible, then it’s inadequate to the task. Certainly, if your system can be hacked by a monkey (staged or otherwise), then it may be time to turn to a more simplified and verifiable process.

Well, I’m pretty tired today.

At work, we’ve been organizing a barbecue/chili cookoff competition, which was today. I am so fucking glad it’s over. What a mess. I just hope we never do one of these things again. We only did it at the CEO’s urgings, and it was a bad idea from start to finish. The only saving grace is that most of the employees had no idea how bad it was.

A lot of people pissed me off today. Anyone bringing a guest to a company event pisses me off; we don’t have the insurance to cover the liability of a non-employee attending an event where about half the meat was cooked off-site. We just don’t. Anyone claiming to have “helped cook” when I’ve been standing there for the past hour and a half and know he didn’t help, and then walking off with a plate so laden with meat, you know there’s not gonna be any left for anyone else (and, sure enough, there wasn’t– I had about a tablespoon-sized serving of barbecue). Anyone who consistently finds some excuse for going through the line FIRST (everyone else has to wait), and doing the same– piling high his plate– before taking off and not even staying to eat with his co-workers (and then has the NERVE to bitch about the event later). Normally, we over-buy on meat so it won’t matter, but this time we asked our employees to cook the meat themselves, and we didn’t want them to have to make 200 servings apiece.

Anyone who piles their plate with meat and then comes over to the vegetarian table to ransack the few veggie skewers that I stayed up until 1 this morning to make can go rot in hell. If I hadn’t made the skewers, the vegetarians would have had ’s amazing chili, and potato salad to eat today– and we would have had a lot of complaints about it. I don’t care if someone is half-vegetarian, eat a little chicken and mostly veggies and wants a veggie entree serving: that’s OK. But we have vegans in the company who won’t get any entree at all if all the skewers are gone before they get there, and we have these fat-assed gluttons who walk out of the line with two heaping plates– one with all their side dishes, and the other with so much dead animal flesh, it’s a wonder no one has called the Department of the Interior on us for endangering species. Anyone who sidesteps the meat line to ransack the veggie table and isn’t even close to being a vegetarian, also pissed me off today. Anyone who called the tofu skewers a “side dish” is lucky not to have had a skewer shoved up their ass.

Oh, and anyone who claims bias or unfair participation on the part of the events committee just sucks. We work our asses off all year long, and we’re doing our best. We participate in the events because we want and need to set an example of participation and enthusiasm. If we didn’t, nothing would happen and every event would be even lamer than this one.

What a clusterfuck.