One of the really long-time arguments about Esperanto comes from those people who criticize its six supersigned letters as being difficult or impossible for print shops, typewriters, computers, take your pick, to handle. The most recent version claims that computers simply can't process those Esperanto characters. Take a look at your keyboard, if you don't believe me. Standrd QWERTYUIOP, and not a 'Ĉ' anywhere in sight.
The answer, of course, is that you can handle just about any character with a computer keyboard. In the Good Old Days of the manual (or even electric) typewriter (I'm not necessarily referring here to the IBM Selectric), you could see the physical linkage between the key on the keyboard and the metal head that inked the character on the paper. You could press the key on which someone had painted '6' and be sure that a '6' would appear on the paper, because you could see the key's connection to the shaft that rose and slammed into the paper.
Computer keyboards are a whole different kettle of fish. What is written on the keyboard may or may not bear any relation to what will be displayed on the screen, or to what may or may not be ejected from the printer. You simply trust that someone has put in the right program to handle those keys in a way that you find convenient. But, for instance, if I were to install a little program called "SuperSigno" (made in Australia), and then press the '`' key followed by the 'c' key, I wouldn't see a '`c' on my screen, but an Esperanto 'ĉ'. This is because that little program takes the signals coming from the keyboard (which, incidentally, have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever is painted on the keys) and filters them to produce the kind of characters I want, not necessarily those that MicroSoft envisioned when they programmed the operating system. There's no longer an unbreakable link between the key you type and the character that's produced. Heck, nowadays you can program an English-language keyboard (the one with the standard 26 characters written on it) to display in Chinese, if you want.
In today's paper I read that the Pentagon has a pilot project to allow troops overseas to vote using the internet. This is in line with a growing enthusiasm, in some quarters, for electronic (and distant) voting. By 2008, some hope, we will be able to vote without leaving our living rooms -- just call up the ballot form on your screen, check off the candidates you want, and submit the form.
And how will that form be processed? Somewhere there will be a piece of software that receives that form, reads the values you submitted, and records them in a database, from which they will be counted later that evening. Could anything be simpler?
And -- oh, yes, I forgot -- there's also a little subroutine that the programmer put in that reads your presidential vote, and, when "Hillary Clinton" is submitted, generates a random number between one and ten, and when that number comes up '7', replaces "Hillary Clinton" with "Dick Cheney". A harmless little trick -- and who's going to notice? (1)
Think it's impossible? Stranger, and worse, things have happened in the past. Remember when Microsoft delivered one version of Windows to mainland China, and when it was installed, users' screens came up with the Chinese for "Death to Communists" and "Independent Taiwan"? A couple of Chinese programmers at Microsoft had simply programmed that into the operating system, and nobody noticed -- until it reached China.
As far as voting is concerned, the perils of electronic voting, some of them unintentional, some considerably more suspicious, seem to have avoided the notice of the traditional press. Those interested might want to take a look at Bev Harris's interesting Black Box Voting, at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/.
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(1) This is a variant on a trick traditionally used to finagle tallies in lever voting machines, as described in chapter 4 of Bev Harris's Black Box Voting.