On the road to disconnect

There's a difficulty in discerning what people in the U.S. want or think.

One of the difficulties serves as the refrain of the loony left, and the other is a riff I borrow from Hugh Hewitt (radio talk show host and self-identified conservative) and Arianna Huffington.

The refrain of the loony left isn't entirely loony. It concerns the reliability of voting systems in providing an accurate tally of the votes cast.
I hate to break it to my friends on the left, but voting systems are inherently imperfect. As one quick example, consider the optical-ballot systems that many favor over the touch-screen systems--the touch-screens systems that convince many fever-swamp-variety Dems that a corporate autocracy is poised to seize control on Tuesday. One of those optical ballot systems served as the basis for a criticism of the Diebold touch-screen systems. They both use computer cards to tabulate totals. So, either hackable computer software is used, or manual counting--and manual counting is classically prone to human error.

In the end, there's probably no way around the inherent inaccuracy of vote tabulations--I suspect that California Democrats richly deserve criticism for dangling a "right to vote in a tamper-proof election" in front of California voters. It's almost like promising lower tax revenues with higher spending--except that deficit spending at least makes the latter suggestion possible.

I know that people don't want to hear it, but that's the way it is.

If people count the votes, the totals may be tampered with.
If machines count the votes, the totals may be tampered with.
I suppose there are other options (such as chimpanzees counting the votes), but I'll stop there since I believe it covers all of options currently used in the United States.

I have nothing against doing everything possible to make voting systems as accurate as possible--just don't fry public confidence in the process by pretending that perfect accuracy is attainable except for a conspiracy among shadowy elites.

There's also the issue of those same Democrats resisting measures that discourage illegal aliens from voting, but that can wait for another day in favor of the issue that Hewitt and Huffington mention regularly.

Polls probably aren't as accurate as they once were, and the polls were never that great to begin with.

Why?

The biggest issue is the expanding popularity of the cellular telephone. Pollsters rely on telephone data to a great extent, but pollsters don't ring up cell phones.

Add in another fact--that Republicans appear less likely to participate in exit-polling--and there's a dilemma concerning the vote. Voting systems are not perfectly accurate, and the methods used to verify the accuracy of voting systems are not perfectly accurate.

The demagoguery of the left on this issue probably damages our democracy--some of it even seems to be geared toward revolution-by-force ("The World Can't Wait").

The fact that voting systems are vulnerable to tampering doesn't mean that one party or the other is fixing the election. Both parties have been guilty of cheating during elections, and for Democrats who can't remember that far back have a look here.