Hanging Chads

The New York Times Magazine has run a long piece, "Can You Count on Voting Machines?," which raises many of the issues that have troubled Americans about the possibility that the most basic processes of political participation could be tinkered with and thus these unwelcome technologies undercut citizens' trust in the reliability of electoral results. Sadly, the article doesn't include some of the interesting ideas of Chris Kelty, who asks why the technology hasn't encouraged us to explore other schemes for deliberation.

The Times also ran a piece about how "Loose Lips Win Elections" without raising the issue of how electronic communication is often represented as a kind of conversational medium that is closer to politically influential speech than writing.