How about thousands upon thousands of votes instantly disappearing from the electronic count of one candidate, or being added to the count of another, with no paper trail left behind? How about electronic voting machines whose programs can be breached and hacked -- patched for fraud, is the new term -- from thousands of miles away? How about new voting technology controlled largely by corporations with strong partisan ties? Not only can it all happen in two weeks, there is a viable case to be made that it's already happened -- in both the decade before and the decade since Bush v. Gore.

And of course the great irony of it all, one of the most under-reported stories of this campaign, is that the politicians and activists who have tried so hard this election cycle to make it harder for poor, ill, and elderly voters to vote are some of the ones most closely aligned with the operatives who can, with a click, determine the outcome of the coming election. Instead of securing accurate voting rights for all, they want to deprive voting rights for some. This is the important message Victoria Collier sends us courtesy of a trenchant piece (not currently online) in the November issue of Harper's *, titled "How To Rig An Election." Collier writes:

Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch the guilty parties in the act, and even dredge the ballot boxes out of bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programming could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.

Collier's piece is timely and jaw-dropping because of the context it offers for this cycle's voting-rights fights. It suggests persuasively that the Florida recount, and the federal legislation it spawned, have made our elections less reliable and thus more susceptible to partisan disenfranchisement than we ever could have imagined watching those hapless bureaucrats count those chads. We took a bad situation, in other words, and made it much worse. If the coming election is as close as everyone seems to think it is, there is no reason to believe with any confidence that honest officials could prevent someone from stealing it outright.

The Ancient Past

For many of us long of voting age, we'll never forget the 2000 election -- and never be able to shake its impact on our enduring perceptions of law, politics, and the intersection of the two. But if you are voting this year for the first time as a teenager -- and I certainly hope you are -- it means that you were in kindergarten or first grade when the U.S. Supreme Court gave the presidential election to George W. Bush by precluding Florida officials from recounting ballots. It means that you were six or seven years old during the Florida recount and likely had no earthly idea what was happening.

In the 1996 Senate race in Nebraska between Chuck Hagel and Ben Nelson, the polls were even days before the election. Yet Hagel won by 15 percent of the vote -- votes counted by a company Hagel had once chaired.

What was happening was one of the most serious political crises of our time, a five-week struggle which ended in the partisan rancor of a 5-4 decision by the justices, a decision that was roundly criticized back then and which has never been cited since by the justices. Al Gore won the national popular vote but lost the election because he lost Florida's electoral votes. And he lost Florida amid great chaos over its ballots and its recount rules. It was a matter of equal protection, the high court's conservatives ruled; it would be unfair to treat recounted ballots differently.