THE VOTING MACHINE AS A CREMATORY
(DAILY PEOPLE, June 3, 1908)

There is no little color of truth in the joke cracked at the
expense of physicians that they are the most enthusiastic people
in favor of cremation. Cremation insures their safety.

In the 18th century Beaumarchais satirized physicians by
declaring their art to be the noblest of all--"its great
achievements are illumined by the sun, while its blunders are
concealed under the sod." And before Beaumarchais, Molihre's
shafts at the doctors were numerous and witty: "the dead were so
discreet." But those days have gone by. The sod has ceased to
conceal medical blunders; the dead have ceased to be discreet.
They are exhumed, and then they frequently talk with a loudness,
a directness, an eloquence that has resulted in heavy damages to
doctors, occasionally even in imprisonment. Cremation insures
the discreetness of babbling corpses, and, therewith the
impunity of physicians.

What cremation is expected by physicians to do for them, that is
expected by the capitalist politicians to be done for political
crookedness by the voting machine. The election frauds that the
Hearst recount is exhuming out of the ballot boxes, together
with the utter lack of discreetness on the part of the exhumed
ballots, has given a new impulse to the cry for the voting
machine on the part of the long-headed capitalist politicians.
And wise they are in their generation. The path being once found
by which to cause ballots to speak after they are buried, what
Rep-Dem politician could enjoy his life in peace with the
specter of the possibly resurrected ballots dogging his heels?

Capitalism is a self-haunted criminal--it needs peace, yet it is
the breeder of unavoidable war; it needs wealth, yet its law of
supply and demand compels it to blight production; it needs
commerce, the tunneling of rivers and mountains, the cutting of
canals, in short, the removal of impediments to traffic, yet the
law of its very existence drives it to raise the artificial
impediments of tariff walls; it needs science, yet enlightenment
summons it to the bar of Reason and adjudges it guilty; etc.,
etc. So with regard to the voting machine.

The mission of capitalism is to lick society into shape for that
cooperative labor without which production cannot be as
plentiful as civilization requires. This implies the machine.
The machine saves labor and multiplies the product. The transfer
of the machine from the field of production to the hustings is
natural. It is a progressive thought. The voting machine saves
labor. More expeditiously and accurately than with the ballot,
the work of voting, recording and announcing the result can be
done by the voting machine. But no sooner is the idea hit upon
than the evil genius which marks capitalism Ichabod comes to
blight the invention. Under capitalist conditions of
fraudulency, the voting machine would promote fraud and hold the
defrauder scathless. The machine can be "fixed" in advance. It
has been known to be "fixed"--registers a certain number of
votes for a hostile candidate, and then stops registering any
more, while continuing to seem to operate. What golden
opportunities for fraud with impunity the voting machine offers
may be judged from the shouts that, led by the organ of the
banker Jacob Schiff, THE NEW YORK TIMES, has gone up from the
capitalist camp in favor of the machine the moment the Hearst
recount began to expose the false counting of the mayoralty
campaign of 1905.

So long as capitalism prevails the blessings of human genius
become curses. Voting machines are to operate as crematory
obliterators of election frauds.