2+2=5 (You'll Do as I Say)

While going to the polls this past week, I was rather amused and somewhat shocked to find that something as vitally important as selecting the leader of our nation had been placed in the "hands" of an automated device that looked not unlike an iPad on steroids, albiet not nearly as sophisticated. Whether by design or by chance, this electronic voting scenario also coincided with one of ur first looks at post-human rhetoric. Well played.

As I have been voting by absentee ballot for quite some time, being in an actual polling place in front of a black box came as a bit of a surprise, especially since I grew up in a rather rural area. Seeing this "new-fangled technology" probably took me by surprise as much as it did Farmer Brown or Sarah the homemaker*. (These people don't exist, to my knowledge, but are symbols of the salt of the earth kind of people that tend to populate my particular voting district. It should be noted they tend to vote straight ticket Republican).

As I was voting, I began to wonder about how accurate and unbiased these machines really were. The creator or programmer of this machine could have easily programmed an algorithm to turn my vote (Jill Stein) into a vote for someone else (Mittens, or the incumbent president). While the machine may not possess agency, the creator of the device or the programmer certainly does. What is to stop that person from creating an algorithm that would change a vote into one for the politician he/she felt was the right person for the job?

As the clip of this documentary shows, a voting machine can be easily programmed to produce results other than the one intended. It is widely known that pro-Romney firms and even Romney's own son own such machines being used in various polling areas in both traditionally red and blue states. I cringed at the thought of my "wasted" vote going towards someone whose policies concerning education, social justice, women's rights, etc., without so much as a thought given to oversight.

Carolyn Miller, in her article What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency? for Rhetoric Society Quarterly addresses similar topics. According to Miller, various testing agencies such as ETS and Vantage Learning are already marketing automated systems to score and critique very human and very interactive actions such as writing and public speaking. These types of automated functions were regarded as "incredulous" by several experts of rhetorical studies. Such claims against this technology included: "To grade via computer takes away one of the hardest parts of public speaking: the public part", and "I believe assessing human beings require[s] human judgement."

If it is true that assessing human beings (or voting for them) requires human judgement, then why would we allow something as important as selecting a nation's leader to be an exception? Machines, which at this point in time contain no agency, the humans that "give them life" do. With such agency, it can be tempting to provide an algorithm (if..., then...) to sway an election or a grade in such a way as to provide a different outcome than was intended. For example:

\begin{algorithmic}
\If {$i\get "Jill Stein"$}
    \State $i\gets "Mitt Romney"$
    \EndIf
\end{algorithmic}

If an algorithm such as the one above were programmed into the coding of the machine, a vote for Jill Stein would be counted as a vote for Romney.

While it is our hope that nothing this deceitful is happening, one cannot be entirely sure.