The wrath of con

The U.S. House of Representatives formally condemned Don Trumpone's recent tweets attacking four House members, all of whom are women of color. The vote broke down largely along party lines with only four Republicans joining all Democrats and new ex-Republican Justin Amash to pass the resolution.

Trump himself urged House Republicans to hold firm prior to the vote.

“Those Tweets were NOT Racist,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body! The so-called vote to be taken is a Democrat con game. Republicans should not show ‘weakness’ and fall into their trap.”

What follows might be obvious to many. However, I suspect that any number of Trump supporters will not know it and I want to explain it as calmly as possible.

Trump told Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to "go back" to what he called "the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came".

As it happens, three of those representatives were born in the United States. Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia but emigrated to the U.S. and became a naturalized citizen.

All four of them are therefore citizens of this country. Just like you, I would guess.

Now, unless you're Native American, you or your ancestors came from somewhere else. Your ancestors might have come from multiple different places, in fact.

How would you feel if you were told to go back where you came from? Not just told, but told in a hostile tone of voice (even if you were told by tweet).

Would you interpret that as, "Go back to the house you woke up in this morning"? Of course not.

Would you take it as, "Go back to the state/county/town where you were born"? Again, no.

There is only one way to interpret "go back where you came from": it's another way of saying, "You don't belong in this country".

You grew up here. Your family and friends are here. You know no other home. You pledge allegiance to no other nation. Yet none of that counts. As far as the one who told you to go back where you came from is concerned, you don't belong.

If that's incomprehensible to you, it's because you're white.

I know, bringing race into the conversation is inflammatory. Yet it's at the heart of the matter, whether you like it or not.

You might want to believe it's a coincidence that none of the four House members Trump targeted was white. You might want to believe Trump's denial tweet, quoted above. You might want to believe that having Ben Carson, an African American man, and Elaine Chao, an Asian American woman, in his Cabinet means that Trump can't be racist.

Above all, you might want to believe that if you don't know you hold racist views, you aren't racist. Nobody wants to be accused of being something he isn't conscious of being, and being called a racist is only a little less toxic and offensive than being called a child predator.

I get all that. But the things you want to believe very likely aren't true.

Trump didn't target House members whose ancestors came from France or the UK, both of which many Americans, including Trump, are fond of considering troubled nations. He targeted people — women, in particular — who are obviously not white.

House members who are white, both male and female, have criticized Trump many times over the last three years. He didn't tell them to go back to their ancestors' homelands. He saved that message for four non-white women.

Why?

Because "go back where you came from" is a favorite message of racists.

The message brands you as racist.

It reveals that you don't think that people who look or sound different from you could possibly have been born here. It reveals that you think they aren't entitled to live here.

So when Trump angrily declares he doesn't have a racist bone in his body, he is simply wrong. However much you want to believe that he isn't racist, he is. However much he wants to believe he isn't racist, he is.

I doubt Trump worries about being racist but he does worry about being thought racist. That might make some of his supporters think hard about whether they really want to stand with him through thick and thin.

In short, he's conning us. Or rather, he's conning you, his loyal supporters.

Trump gets publicly angry because a lifetime in the murky world of real estate development has taught him that most people back down in the face of visible anger. Scared people don't unmask con men: that's the lesson he has absorbed to the depths of his being. His vehemence isn't a sign of his innocence, it's a sign of his commitment to his con — and of his urgent need to keep you committed to it as well.

There is no way to stand with Trump on those tweets without getting the stink of outright racism all over yourself. If you are okay with those tweets, you are racist.

Are you?

Electronic voting cannot be secured

A while back I argued that governments should adopt only electronic voting systems that run on open-source software.

I have to take back that advice.

“You simply can’t construct a trusted paper trail,” [Georgia Tech professor Richard] DeMillo says, “if you let a machine make a ballot for you.”

...

... some of the nation’s leading experts on computer science and elections concluded that there is no “technical mechanism currently available that can ensure that a computer application—such as one used to record or count votes—will produce accurate results.” One reason the authors noted: Malicious software “can be introduced at any point in the electronic path of a vote—from the software behind the vote-casting interface to the software tabulating votes—to prevent a voter’s vote from being recorded as intended.”

Translation: wherever computers are involved in the voting process, bad actors could corrupt the software. Whether that means some votes are ignored or altered, whether it happens at the polling place or a county central facility, the vote will have been subverted.

The problem with my original recommendation is that there is no way for people to know what the software on a given computer is actually doing. In general we cannot even know with certainty whether a computer is running the software the vendor intended.

You might object that we all use computers every day in spite of this concern, and that things pretty much work out as expected. Why, therefore, should electronic voting machines be any different?

The answer is, electronic voting machines carry out a task that is hugely important to the country, a task whose consequences affect millions. That gives bad actors a tremendous incentive to penetrate and to subvert such systems, far more incentive than they have to break into your computer or mine.

If you take the problem of subverted computers seriously you can make such subversion a lot harder. The trouble is that elected officials don't take the problem seriously. They're too ignorant of computers and software to grasp the problem's potential scope. Or worse, they're too concerned with fighting the bad press from past elections. Such seems to be the case with Georgia state senator William T. Ligon, Jr. He is not familiar with the fatal vulnerabilities of software systems, nor does he comprehend exactly how they work.

... Instead, Ligon cites the testimony of former Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox as one of the reasons he chose to back a system based on touch-screen voting machines that print out a paper ballot.

Cox told the legislature about “under votes, over votes, and stray votes. They all come with hand-marked paper ballots,” Ligon says. It is clear to him that printed ballots bring more certainty. When asked about research demonstrating that voters don’t or can’t verify their ballots when printed, Ligon said, “Voters have to take some responsibility for verifying their ballots.”

Ligon's familiar with all the fiascos that embarrassed Florida in the 2000 election but he has no clue about the ones that will engulf him and his colleagues if Georgia's electronic voting systems are cracked. All he understands is a PR nightmare from two decades ago. Talk about fighting the last war.

By ignoring voters' predictable behavior, Ligon demonstrates contempt for voting itself. Worse, the supposed verification he cites as the safeguard for election security is absolutely meaningless. The votes that will be counted are the digital ones, not the ones on the paper record. (If you were going to count paper ballots you wouldn't need software at the polling place at all: you'd make people mark their ballots the old-fashioned way.) Subverted software could print a faithful representation of the voter's choices while altering or ignoring the digital record. And again, it's the digital record of the vote that will be counted (or not).

These are not hard problems to understand, but you have to be willing to learn from experts. Ligon is not willing to learn. And he likely has a lot of company. Between willful ignorance (whether from anti-intellectualism or simply finding the concepts difficult to grasp) and a thirst for campaign contributions (electronic voting companies throw a lot of money around to entice officials to buy their products), we can expect that too many jurisdictions will make the foreseeably harmful choice to adopt vulnerable electronic voting systems.

Guys like Ligon have to be held accountable: their feet have to be held to the fire until they listen to the experts who understand these things.

In the meantime, voters must demand paper ballots, no matter how cumbersome and primitive they seem.

Glitz versus greatness

The so-called leader who ducked out of military service in Viet Nam has ordered the military to participate in Washington, D.C.'s annual Fourth of July festivities.

White House officials have said Mr. Trump’s speech is not intended to be political, but rather an homage to the military and to the United States. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, “The president loves America and wants to help all Americans celebrate our nation’s independence with a salute to America on the National Mall.”

If what made the United States great was its military, the United States would not have earned the respect of millions (at least before Don Trumpone waddled into the Oval Office).

The U.S. military was a relatively minor component of the nation before World War II. People didn't emigrate to the United States for more than a century because they lusted after its military hardware. They came because they heard the siren call of the nation's promise that all men could be free.

The history of this nation has been a struggle to live up to the ideals enshrined in the Constitution. Those ideals and our determination to embody them in the way we live are the wellspring of this nation's greatness.

To highlight the military on the national holiday that celebrates the country (rather than a religious event like Christmas) is to misconstrue the very nature of the country. The military is a fine institution but it's no accident that it is subordinate to the nation's civilian authority. The nation's heart is its commitment to shared ideals.

Trump comprehends none of this. He is obsessed with surface impressions, with visuals and sparkle. Fighter jets are impressive, tanks are impressive, and that makes them emblems of greatness in his eyes. If he could get a Ford-class aircraft carrier onto the streets of D.C., it would be part of his plans for the Fourth.

Anyway, Trump is uniquely incapable of uniting this nation around shared ideals. Even before his 2016 campaign he specialized in divisive, ugly rhetoric (birtherism, demonizing the Central Park Five, lying about Arab Americans cheering the fall of the World Trade Center towers) because he is incapable of inspiring others. He can only conceive of himself triumphing and others being vanquished. "Greatness" is reserved for him and his adoring followers alone.

Military parades, France's Bastille Day celebration notwithstanding, bring to mind tinpot dictators trying to distract their unhappy populaces. The comparison is all too apt in our own case, I fear.

Trying to link the military so tightly to the nation's "greatness" besmirches both. Trump will go to his grave not understanding that. The rest of us, however, must.