I have to confess. I hate Diebald voting machines.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by SpencerH
I think we can agree that this became a left-fashionable issue after Florida where a proportion of the populace were too stupid, senile, or incapacitiated to punch a voting card correctly.

The real problem can't be fixed by technology, and that's the willingness of those in power to manipulate the vote. From faulty machines to stripping the franchise from eligible voters, to voter intimidation and misdirection, to vote padding, those who see the public treasury as their private purse aren't going to have any qualms about fixing elections. Even Scantrons can be fixed, simply by making sure that physical votes disappear.

The vote in 2000, however, was especially egregious. There was significantly more going on than 3,000 elderly Jews voting for a Holocaust denier. 90,000 non-felons had their right to vote illegally stripped from them. 27,000 votes in Black precincts in Jacksonville were spoiled by bad machines. At least 2,000 spoiled absentee ballots were counted in violation of state law. People were chased away from polling stations. Something went badly wrong if you're a believer in democracy and the inviolability of the the right to vote.

Technology could have prevented some of those problems, but not all of them. But again, the answer is not to use machines from a politically connected company that doesn't have a physical record that can be examined after the fact. These machines are black boxes. We have no idea how votes are processed, and we have no real reason to trust those who tell us that everything's going to be fine.

Remember, he who casts the vote decides nothing. He who countrs the votes decides everything.