Please try and keep in mind whose idea it was to change the voting system in the first place. To read some of these articles and posts, one would think that it had been a cherished ambition of the Republican Party for years to get rid of punch cards and other simple and reliable voting systems and turn to computers.

Nobody asked for my opinion before they changed our system to touch screen.

The fact of the matter is that the simplest and most reliable systems, like marks on paper, cannot be rapidly tallied to give us the instant results we have come to demand. We may need to decide if we are willing to wait a few days to see how an election turns out in exchange for easy voting and reliable results.

Meanwhile, just make sure the software works reliably (how often in the course of a day does your life depend on software working? Fly a plane lately?), that the machines are independent of networks (they currently are, to the best of my knowledge), and that a paper copy is made and stored in ballot boxes for recounts. This is not rocket science.

This is not a difficult problem, and those people like Krugman who are trying to blow it up into a scenario where any Democratic loss must therefore be due to cheating, is not productive.

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The irony of Microsoft is that for years it was not a player in politics at all, with total political donations floating in the hundred thousand dollar range. Then the government showed Bill Gates that one of the most powerful companies in the world can be destroyed at the whim of a politician. I watched Gates fight for his life in the dock as Senators who probably wouldn't know an operating system if it bit them in the ass toyed with the future of Gates and his employees. To many of them, Gates was guilty simply because he was rich and successful.

In 2002, Microsoft made political donations totalling over $2.5 million, and Bill Gates is becoming aware of how politics works. People may yet be sorry that they woke this sleeping giant.

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Civil service moles? Just for fun, go to your nearest civil service agency, and poll them to see how many of them are right wingers. Of course, all of them could be lying, and be secret Klansmen. Like the mysterious computers, how would you prove otherwise?

In point of fact, the tactic you mention has been a hallmark of the Left since the 1960s. I've read actual brochures, describing how to gain power beginning at the local levels of government, although that was a long time ago. The Left succeeds largely by fogging its real agenda.