Tales from Wasilla: The Triumph of the Stupid

Matanuska-Susitna Borough Offices (Photo credit KTUU Digital Staff)

Readers ask why WC “picks on Wasilla.” That would be because no other community WC knows is as egregiously, consistently and pridefully stupid as Wasilla. If you think WC is exaggerating, let’s have a look at the latest folly to emerge from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley.

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly voted October 4, 2022 to ban the use of voting machines and vote tabulation machines in the Mat-Su Borough elections. Only one assembly member voted against the ordinance, and he was heckled by the crowd for being sensible.

Mind you, in an effort to reassure voters like the citizens of Mat-Su Borough, Alaska Lt. Governor Kevin Meyers (R, Conoco-Phillips) performed a statewide audit of the last general election. The audit had election workers hand-count each of the 361,400 ballots cast and they came up with a total of – wait for it – just 24 votes that were different from the results certified by the Division of Elections. That’s an error rate of 0.0066408411732%, six thousandths of one percent. That’s pretty close to perfect. WC respectfully suggests it’s a several of orders of magnitude lower than the error rate in the average Mat-Su voter’s neurons.

You see, the Ma-Su Borough Assembly has bought into Trump’s Big Lie in a big way. Never mind that there isn’t a scintilla of evidence showing that voting machines corrupt the election process. In all of those sixty-plus lawsuits challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, not one found evidence that voting machines or vote tabulation machines – those aren’t the same thing – had been or could be compromised. Despite desperate, near hysterical attempts to find fraud, there has been nothing to show any vote tabulation machine was involved in election fraud in any manner whatsoever. None. Zero. Zilch.

But the particularly toxic blend of paranoia, stupidity and ignorance that is practically the hallmark of the Valley triumphed over evidence, logic, science and reason. A logical fallacy, the Big Lie, overcame fifty years of careful studies and research.

Counting ballots, doing so accurately and quickly, is tedious and difficult. Machines are much, much better at tedious tasks than humans. WC, acting as attorney for several different municipalities, has watched many election tabulations. WC has watched the individual tabulators make mistakes as the counting process advances. A ballot-scanning machine never gets tired, never fails to properly tabulate and, if it encounters a problem with a ballot, alerts a human to the problem.

Today, across the country, about 70% of elections at the local, state and federal level use the technology that Alaska uses: electronic scanning and tabulation of manually completed ballots. Note these are not electronic voting machines, so-called Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) machines. Alaskan voters do not use DREs, where the vote is cast digitally and, usually, a printed replica of the digital ballot is created for audit. Much of the noisy, confused testimony at the public hearing on the Mat-Su ordinance attacked DREs. Which Alaska doesn’t even use. Because Wasilla.

But subtleties like that are lost on the citizens of Mat-Su and their elected representatives, so, to address a problem that demonstrably does not exist at all, they have thrown out the baby and the bath, and reverted to a much more error-prone, Nineteenth Century technology.

Folks, it’s enough to make you despair.