America stands before the world today a smaller and sadder nation. This proud land of the free and the brave is humbled, constrained, craven. The lamp of liberty flickers with a feeble light.

We’ve killed the Oldsmobile. The mammoth 98, the demure yet powerful 88, the menacing Cutlass – gone.

Oh yeah, also gone is any notion that our elections are anywhere near as fair and efficient as we’d like to have the world think. As one of the many scholarly experts we’ve come to think of as part of our extended TV family during the last five weeks put it, we suffer from 1776 Syndrome – 200-plus years of relatively trouble-free voting and peaceful transitions of power have made us technically sloppy and ethically lazy.

Florida is, of course, the butt of this electoral joke and with good reason. A place so lacking in geographic interest it was once described as the state God forgot to finish – all the charm of a parking lot and none of the utility, someone else said – now has distinguished itself as the state that has a political climate ideally suited for the cultivation of incompetent elections officials.

You can’t have a good joke without a butt, and nothing heightens the pleasure of having a good laugh at another’s expense like knowing you yourself committed the same laughable offense but simply didn’t get caught. According to a recent and amazingly thorough report by the Los Angeles Times on nationwide electoral bumbling, we’ve all been busted.

The Times carefully separates outright corruption from just plain incompetence, but the conclusion is that both are enabled by the same phenomenon – a tendency not just to rely upon machines to do our counting for us, but to trust those machines with unquestioning blind faith, despite clear evidence many of these machines are incorrigible liars.

On the corruption side, one rigged voting machine can do the work of a hundred ballot box stuffers in a fraction of the time. One Times reporter witnessed a reform-minded Louisiana state representative demonstrate how one of the most common makes of voting machine – the Shoup – can be jimmied to return any desired result with only a cigarette lighter, a screwdriver and a Q-Tip. Oregon’s new mail-in voting system already has attracted the criminal element – political operatives merely trail the mail carrier and swipe the blank ballots. It is estimated that some fraudulent 36,000 ballots were cast this way.

But it is the unwarranted trust honest humans put in machines that is most disturbing. The Shoup, a lever-action machine in use throughout the country, weighs 900 pounds and has 27,000 moving parts. New York City has 6,221 of them, moved from warehouses to precincts every Election Day. The city does not, however, have the technicians to keep those 27,000 parts working smoothly, so the accuracy of the vote counts is questionable. Since no place in the country has the technicians, it is estimated that misaligned machines of this type may have resulted in as many as 100,000 incorrectly recorded votes nationwide this election, an average of 2,000 per state.

Another type of machine has a key that is supposed to be turned to lock in the final tally at the end of Election Day. The Times found that a lot of poll workers think it’s the ignition and turn it at the start of voting, resulting in votes being cast but not recorded.

At the cutting edge technology end of the spectrum, things don’t look much better. A simple programming error in a California touch-screen system reversed the totals of the first and last-place finishers in a city council race. The error came to light only when the true winner questioned why he got only one vote in the precinct where his mother and father lived. Still, progress marches on – more than 8 percent of counties nationwide have upgraded to these machines, despite their enormous costs, the likelihood of undetected error and the fact that there is no paper ballot left behind to correct detected error. Techies who push Internet voting by assuring us that the security issues being raised by opponents are minor details might first want to figure out why Postal Service computers directed a couple of Washington State mail-in ballots to a small island off the coast of Denmark.

Maine can be fairly confident in its voting apparatus. Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn says it hasn’t used a Shoup-type machine in years; the two optical-reader types in use here – the AccuVote and the Optech – are quite accurate and, because the voter actually fills out a paper ballot, leave behind a real document that can answer any questions.

Further, completing the arrow (Optech) and filling in the oval (AccuVote) requires fairly large, definite strokes by voters. Maine law, like Florida and almost every other state, require elections officials to register ballots not filled out exactly according to instructions if the intent of the voter can be discerned. Discerning the intent of a large felt-tip marker is a lot easier than trying to read the mind of a tiny little chad.

Most Maine municipalities, 419 to be exact, still count votes by hand, while 103 (containing 60 percent of the population) use the scanning machines. A couple of hand-counting errors were found in the state legislature recounts, but Ms. Flynn observes, because all Maine voting starts with a paper ballot, there is always a paper trail that can lead to accuracy. And here’s an interesting tidbit – the House and Senate recounts did reveal numerous instances in which Mainers went to the polls and didn’t bother to vote for president.

Overall, experts told the Times as many as 2 million ballots, either properly cast or with clear intent, were not counted this year because of faulty, out of whack or just plain poorly designed machines. No wonder then that General Motors has scrapped the line of cars that once defined machine design at the highest level. The proud car that just a quarter century ago, through a deft melding of absurd size and obscene horsepower, provided both comfortable family travel and unparalleled opportunities for wholesome teen-age recreation, was downsized into a pathetic object of ridicule. Is there any better metaphor for the decline of the democratic process in America?

Another tidbit. A 900-pound Shoup was being unloaded in Queens, New York. It fell off the truck and onto a car. Witnesses reported seeing elections workers pick up the Shoup, and, hearing none of the 27,000 parts rattling around, wheeled it into the polling place where it presumably miscounted votes as if nothing had happened. The car, however, was totaled and I’m betting it wasn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.