In the 1980s, when it was discovered that the wife of the leader of the free world was using an astrologer to chart her husband’s political career, it was noted that the exact same practice was predicted by Robert A. Heinlein in his book, “Stranger in a Strange Land” which was published more than a generation before the revelations about Nancy Reagan.

Robert Heinlein also showed how you can steal an election without anyone being the wiser: you use a computer system to count votes, where the computer system’s integrity is trusted and there is no means to provide a reliable audit trail outside of the computer system.

He wrote about that in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” which was first published in 1966. And nearly 40 years later, (almost) nobody seems to have remembered yet another of the late, great Bob Heinlein’s prophetic views.

“The lessons of history teach us — if the lessons of history teach us anything — that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.”

And to think that Diebold’s (one of the companies who make the evoting machines for the US elections) CEO Walden W. O’Dell, appears on the list of bush sponsors, that most evoting software is propietary and blackbox (nobody can look at the algorithm), that apparently O’Dell has said that he will do anything too get Bush a re-election (Orwell Rolls in His Grave) and that the audit trails are easy to tamper with … Fortunately the Electronic Frontier Foundation keeps an eye on it … hopefully that’s enough.