Smug Bastard Cabal

And I just think I heard machine political fixers throughout the country have a screaming orgasm. Paper receipts have been a cause for the hard left in this country for a few years now - since the 2000 election at least. This despite the fact that there hasn't been any evidence of ballots being changed by voting machines that hasn't been thoroughly discredited and the fact that tracking down the voting receipts after the vote and recount (essentially what such a fix implies) is a laughable exercise logistically. Now, at first, you might ask yourself "Well, so what, they want to fix a problem that isn't really there. Sure it might cost some money, but it's not really a big deal." And if that were the only issue at stake here, I'd agree. But it's not. You see, at the turn of the last century, we instituted a thing called the Australian ballot. That might be better known to you as the secret ballot. The idea is that your vote is cast in private and no one else knows how you voted. Now, most people think that change was geared toward protecting people from voting intimidation. That people can vote their consciences free of concern about what might happen to them for voting that way. And, while this is undoubtedly a benefit of the approach, it wasn't the actual reason behind it. You see, throughout the last century we had political machines and bosses who regularly rigged elections to make sure things went their way. While they undoubtedly did things like ballot box stuffing, hiring goons to keep people away, or other coercive tactics, that wasn't their primary tool. They found it was a lot easier (and safer) to obtain votes the way any other organization gets any other needed resource. They went out and bought them. That's the reason, for example, that many states forbid bars from being open on election day. A shot for a vote was a pretty standard bid price. The secret ballot was aimed at combatting the machines and bosses by making the product purchased unverifiable. If the machines can't verify you stayed bought, what was the sense in buying you? But, this move cures that problem for the fixer. Now, all he's got to do is set a price per receipt.