The day after President Bush's State of the Union speech, most pundits have addressed the fact that the bulk of his remarks pertained to domestic issues. While problems still exist in Iraq, he (not surprisingly) is absolutely sure that things will take care of themselves. I don't share his confidence regarding Iraq's future, and I certainly have my doubts about the quality of the democracy which he seems to have forgotten here at home (this is still a democracy, right Alberto Gonzalez?).

I have discussed the haphazard job that the Diebold Corp. has been doing in carrying out its duties as the defenders of the purest element of democracy: voting. You might think that a company whose only task is creating voting machines could take care of business. However, after last summer's nightmarish stories about how easily their machines can be hacked, it became clear that they couldn't. Now, as if we didn't already have our doubts about these machines, a new flaw is discovered: they post pictures of the master key on their own website. And by master key, I mean the ONE key that opens EVERY Diebold voting machine. It was only a matter of time before someone recreated a key based on the photo, and tried it out.



I'm no locksmith, but is the only thing between a clean election and a full-blown scandal nothing more than a mini-bar key from Motel 6? Isn't there something wrong with entrusting the duty of manufacturing voting machines to a company whose CEO made substantial donations to a particular political party? (Republican, in case you were wondering).

I find myself asking this a lot recently, but is this really the best we can do?

Jonathan is the editor of SkipperStyle, a political blog.