He was a hard one to compliment. “I’m no genius,” he protested when I told the radio audience of his invention. “The whole thing is much too easy.”
I’d pointed out that he’d invented a way to steal elections from computer-voting. “Anybody could do it!” he insisted. Clint Curtis returned my compliment unopened.
Curtis was an attorney and a computer genius. He had been approached by a candidate for Congress in Florida who asked if he could come up with something that would enable the loser to become the winner. Curtis thought the candidate wanted that technology to show the world how easy it is to steal elections. Wrong! He wanted to steal an election! Curtis testified before an Ohio House committee in 2004. The ease of election-stealing ignited no thunderclap, not even a butterfly’s belch.
“Russia could easily choose the next president of the United States,” Curtis added. “And Trump has good reason to fear he’ll be screwed.”
Twin thoughts occurred. “The Good Old Days” never get a fair break. When anybody mentions “The Good Old Days” it’s always to disparage those of us who miss them.
The second thought was merely how much I miss the G-O-D (The Good Old Days). The first election I remember is Roosevelt vs. Landon. That was 1936. The first I remember with vote fraud as a serious threat is right now.
Blacks suffered legal discrimination in those Good Old Days, and women were property, and all America can take a bow for our progress in redressing those and other injustices. But I don’t remember any fear that elections were “engineered” by high-tech thieves.
In the Good Old Days I miss, you almost never heard “Where are the car keys?” They were in the ignition switch, Stupid, where keys belong! Car theft? Oh, sure, a distant rumor that happened to somebody’s uncle in Tennessee. No real threat! And who would have believed the casualty count over a weekend on the streets of Chicago could exceed that of three Mideast wars combined?
It’s those “little things” that make me ache for the Good Old Days. As a teenager I fell madly in love with actress Ingrid Bergman. I went to a bookstore and told the clerk, “I want a language book in whatever language it is she speaks.” The clerk replied, “She’s from Sweden. We have ‘Hugo’s Swedish Simplified’ for two dollars and fifty cents.” I only had two dollars. I said, “Do you have anything similar, cheaper?” “Yes,” he replied. “We have ‘Hugo’s Norwegian Simplified’ for one dollar and fifty cents!” Deal done. Try anything comparable in an American bookstore today!
On the sidewalks of New York, newspapers are sold from fortified automatic dispensers that would take a small tank to break open. In those bygone days our Greensboro Daily News copies were there out in the open, there for the pickin’ in improvised racks with a pitiful paper cup to drop your nickels into. Don’t congratulate us because we never stole a newspaper or the nickels. Congratulate us for never having the thought that we might help ourselves to a free paper and a few nickels!
If you’d taken a seat in the student section of Kenan Stadium for a North Carolina Tar Heels football game, you’d find under your seat a dozen big pieces of cardboard of different colors, with a page of detailed instructions. If you then sat directly across the field you’d be treated to the spectacular “Card Stunts.” The head cheerleader would call for, let’s say, Stunt No. 5. You’d look at your instructions and see you were supposed to hoist up a green – or red or blue or whatever – card at the cheerleader’s command. What a joy to see a whole section of the stadium explode into a full color “billboard” welcoming our guests from elsewhere!
You might see messages spelling themselves out in moving handwriting. As the cheerleader counted you’d flip your correct-color card over when he got to the appropriate number. The visitors would dissolve in admiration as they saw our greetings “magically” spelled out in handwriting-by-the-numbers.
That’s so long gone I’ll bet you the head cheerleader at Carolina never heard of the thing. The 1960s came along with drugs and marijuana and … I don’t want to talk about it. Drunken Tar Heels killed it all by sailing their cards like Frisbees across the stadium. Forget about it.
Right after the heroic Hungarian Freedom Fighters wrested control of their small nation from Soviet occupation in October 1956, the cast of the top Broadway show, “My Fair Lady,” gave them an ingenious salute. On the night the Hungarians chopped down the Stalin statue in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, the cast changed the lyric about an awful man “from Budapest … Never have I ever met a ruder pest.” On that night the cast sang instead of an awful man from Bucharest, Romania’s capital. The audience got it and stood and applauded for five solid minutes. Don’t expect anything similar nowadays.
The only cure for election theft is “back to the future” – back to plain old paper ballots. We may have to wait up all night to see who won, but it’s much more likely it’ll be the real winner!
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