I started to write a novel...

about three years ago. I was selling voter registration systems and electronic voting machines. My company had developed a partnership with a firm in Texas. They had great products. Their voter registration system was vapor ware. It was, however, backed by a very solid vanilla HTML-based, wire-frame user interface, a legacy-system-port requirements package, and a fit-gap to complete the design. Their electronic voting machines, on the other hand, were the best engineered product on the market, and had the highest quality user interface. We had some limited success as partners. Their software and hardware products eventually made some money in their respective spaces.

I began work on my novel by developing an outline that included love scenes, major geek time, and a core of political intrigue. I wrote a great deal, off and on for over a year. I would write, and then real life would overtake my project. I would put it down for a few months, and then begin to write again.

Then a catastrophe struck.

My complete outline was published in the papers. It was carried by every major news organization in the country. It was shown in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, discussed by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. It was a nightmare that occupied my days.

I do not mean to suggest that anyone stole the outline I wrote, or plagiarized my written ideas.

All that I had conceived just came true.

I get my muse on now and again. I periodically visualize and vocalize the obvious before it occurs. Sometimes I even make wild predictions that are latterly proved true.

In this case, however, I was simply a guy with two passions - politics and information technology - who could see far enough into the past to understand how badly these two worlds would mix in the future.

I did not choose the topic accidentally.

I knew the level of integrity of several of the corporate characters in this space. The executive at Diebold finally spoke to the nation what all of us in this space had long known when he agreed to deliver Ohio to Bush. He was certainly not the only person thinking along those lines.

Information technology and politics well represent men and women in Tannen's book, "You just don't understand..." Information technology solves problems by applying rational solutions. Politics is pure passion; she wants nothing more than to be understood. She expects -- and accepts -- nothing more, as well.

I have seen politicians and political-bureaucrats put information technologists through a grotesque range of systemic contortions to support purely selfish political motives. Sometimes the technologists merely spend a long time, and waste a great deal of money, at failure. Frequently a team of technologists is scapegoated and fired. Periodically the offending politico is also canned.

It did not take a genius to predict that information technology would be skinned by politicians in the election space.

I left my notebook in the seat-back pocket on a Delta commuter jet in Dallas, Texas. I called Delta for months hoping to retrieve it. My version of the story was lost forever.

I saw no reason to revive the project when it ceased to be fiction. What could I really add to make it any more interesting, or more surreal, than it already was?

I saw an article in the news this week that indicated electronic voting was being suspended in The Netherlands.

Sociology has been defined as the documentation of the obvious. Perhaps fiction is but a race to stay in front of current events.

         Information technology
            "pwned"
                  by politics
         is now history
                  waiting
         to be written.