Anyone who voted in 2000 remembers the uneasy feeling that crept up the nation’s spine during the Florida recount debacle. Whatever your political affiliation, you had to recognize that, despite all the media’s assurances, the system had failed.

The dirty secret of political coverage is that the system has always failed to some degree. Votes are always lost, miscounted, discarded, in ways both innocuous and sinister. It’s a part of the political reality that the system is not perfect.

But it’d never failed as spectacularly as in 2000, the year journalist Mark Danner called “the perfect storm” of voting failures. That spawned the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which dumped $3.9 billion into the states which needed updated voting machines. The idea was that newer technology would prevent another Florida ‘00.

One problem: the machines – ATM-like systems with touch-screens – don’t work. Or when they do work, strange things happen: double-digit leads evaporate overnight, votes disappear or multiply, two Texas Republican candidates are elected with the exact same number of votes.

Of course, it’s pure coincidence that many of these machines are manufactured by Diebold, a heavy Republican contributor whose CEO is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” It’s also coincidental that Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is the former head of, and retains an interest in, ES&S -- the company that provides all of Nebraska’s voting machines. Those same machines delivered Hagel’s stunning upset in 1996, in which he swept virtually every demographic group to become the first Republican Senator of Nebraska in 24 years.

It’s easy to speculate about such oddball results because the machines leave no paper trail. How do you check to make sure vote counts are accurate? You ask the machine. Surprisingly (not), the computer will never be wrong according to its records.

Critics of the machines claim this lack of accountability makes it easy to steal an election. So easy, in fact, that election rigging may become the new hobby of bored MIT students, or even community college students. Children may also get in on the act.

Defenders reply that creating a verifiable paper trail is financially unfeasible. After all, look how hard it is to get an ATM to print your receipt (sarcasm.)

In addition to all that, there’s the lack of security around the machines. A group of hackers found they could break into one using a bent paperclip. Once inside, they found a Microsoft Access database, which they changed to give the results they wanted and copied back to the machine with no one the wiser.

And perhaps the most ironic result of the push to use electronic voting machines: Studies that compare touch-screen voting with the more prevalent lever and punch-card method reveal the punch-cards to be more accurate, as elderly voters (I’m looking at you, Florida) tend to be confused by the newer technology.

Complexity: Low. There’s nothing complex about insecure SmartCards and confused elderly.

Plausibility: High. Wait, I meant low. Crap, I think I just aided the terrorists.

Where It Will Help You Score: Use this conspiracy theory at hacker conventions and computer science departments. For a fresh twist, try dropping Stalin’s maxim, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything,” on that pretty young thing demonstrating next to you.

Ha ha, I know what you mean! Aren’t we all lost in this game called life? But seriously, shouldn’t you be peeking out the back of some co-ed’s low-rise jeans?

Oh, that is a sad story. Right there in the street? Did her friends say anything?

Too drunk, yes, I understand. I’m sorry for you, but we’ve all been there. We all forget our friends now and again, even if those friends are as intimately acquainted as you and she.

Adventures? Why, no, I guess I’ve never really considered having any adventures…I’m more of the go-along to get-along type.

Are you saying we should team up to fight crime?

Ok, you’re right. Sorry, that was silly of me. I was temporarily blinded by your flashy sequins and glittering promises. I’m just a simple fellow, really, not one to rock the boat. Sometimes, late at night, though, I think… no. I shouldn’t say.

Well, it’s just that yes, I too have dreams. Prosaic, maybe, to someone like you, a blue thong loose in the big city, going wherever the winds carry you. But they’re my dreams, nonetheless.

No, your life is not for me, slender blue thong. Too razzle-dazzle, too fast-lane, too hot blacktop and unprotected sex in highway rest stops – I’d only slow you down. But I’m glad you’re out there, living the life I sometimes, in my most secret heart, wish I had.

Now hop on, my postage-stamp-and-dental-floss-looking friend. Let me take you where you’ll be able to live – LIVE! I’ll drop you in the mailbox of my neighbor, the one who slides notes under my door, asking me to turn down my pornography after 11 PM.

– CANTELLE FONTAIN

more info at www.blackboxvoting.org