Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
8 Epilogue
In August 2010, a CNN poll revealed that only 42 percent of Americans
believed that Barack Obama was “definitively born in the U.S.”
1
It would
not be until the release of the original (paper) birth certificate in April 2011
that the nagging doubts over his eligibility to hold the world's most pres-
tigious office would finally subside. The presidency of Obama's predecessor,
George W. Bush, had been tainted by similar questions over the authentic-
ity of a mundane paper artifact, the voting ballot. Indeed, the inability of
voting ballots to deliver, even under intense scrutiny, conclusive evidence
of voters' intention threatened to derail the legitimacy of the American
electoral process.
The material failure of the technology to deliver an unambiguous
verdict had significant consequences, not the least of which was the
Supreme Court's direct intervention in settling the election's outcome. It
also revealed that the political process of the most technologically advanced
nation on earth and flag-bearer of democracy depended on antiquated
technologies, rigged up through a patchwork of local regulations that no
comprehensive federal law had ever tamed. More than any other election
before it,
Bush v. Gore
powerfully drove the point that “to vote is not simply
to form and to express a political opinion. It is, inseparably, to participate
in a technological process.”
2
Indeed, in yet another manifestation of the intimate relationship of
paper and political power, democracy itself seems indissociable from the
technology of the secret ballot. Combined with the voting booth, it func-
tions as democracy's most powerful symbol, its correct implementation the
litmus test for the
bona fides
of new converts. The 2000 election was thus
a massive catastrophe, one that launched multiple initiatives for legislative
