Ah, but Microsoft can buy a Senator or two if it chooses. Corporate influence is not the issue here.

Is there inadequate security or not?

Are there huge openings for manipulation or not?

Can our electoral system be hacked or not?

Can we control who does the hacking or not?

Ensuring "one citizen, one vote" has always been a big deal. It used to be that thugs could manipulate the vote by threatening everybody because votes were public. Going to the secret ballot changed that.

A certain amount of vote-buying continues to be practiced, though the secret ballot has made the return on the investment more like buying a lottery ticket: you can't win if you don't play, but buying a zillion tickets doesn't guarantee a win either.

Now our secret ballot system leaves us open to manipulation because of the methods we are choosing to make voting easier. If the results are so secret that we can't call for a recount because there is no record to consult, if the results are collected using software that has myriad opportunities for the tech-savvy to play with the data and leave no tracks, then how do we know who has actually elected the people in office?

If Mr. Krugman is using partisan arguments, it's because this is a partisan issue. All partisans will be concerned with this. Unless legitimate concerns about election security can be answered, every partisan with an ax to grind will be given a whole hardware store full of them, and a whetstone. No election will be free from the suspicion of tampering. This will destabilize the entire process over time.

Also, you have used the example of David Duke not getting elected several times in support of your assertion that the Right's loons don't get equal play with the Left's. Consider this: A small but very dedicated group of insurgents have decided that, rather than try to take over liberal democracy by conquest, they will worm their way into the inner circles and create rot. It can take years and years to develop moles in the civil service, which perhaps they have started to do. Heaven knows it's been done before. But, in an interesting side development to speed access to government information, they begin to run people for office. "Regular"-looking people. People who perhaps couldn't win in a big election, but who might make it to the state legislature, where they can move up. Maybe even to Congress eventually, with all the access to information that public office brings. Of course they will get elected: the support group contains skilled hackers who know how to manipulate election results.

David Duke could get elected with sufficient data massage. So could a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and perhaps more easily than David Duke, who has had all that press coverage. And if challenging election results labels the challenger as a partisan fanatic or a conspiracy nutcase, the challenger will have to have a very strong character indeed to withstand the personal attacks that follow the challenge. (Another reason to avoid ad hominem attacks in political discourse, btw: it drives the moderates away, leaving only Joan of Arc and Leon Trotsky in the commentators' booth.)

Ask yourself if you'd want elections in Iraq to use these machines and this software. If the answer is a nameless case of the heebiejeebies, why would we want to use it here?

Regards--
Mary Anne