The damn voting machines are sometimes used as an excuse for not voting. Please, if you don't vote, don't use this excuse. Obviously, if a significant percentage of us give up, we are doomed to lose our democracy. There is a growing movement of people who are organizing to oppose the theft of our vote, and they are making progress. Don't give up, join the fight. Go to http://www.velvetrevolution.us/ There are links here to many groups - thousands of people fighting for your rights.
You've probably heard of the Help America Vote Act. What a lovely name. Sounds righteous, noble, and fair. Did you know that the principle author of this legislation was Bob Ney? Bob Ney is a congressman from Ohio, at the time that I'm writing this. He won't be much longer though because last week he pled guilty to crimes involving the infamous lobbyist Jack Abermoff. He hasn't resigned from congress yet though, we are still paying his salary. Voting machine companies like Diebold and ES&S, pay lobbyists like Jack, who in turn bribe congressmen like Bob, to write bills that make suckers like us, fund the purchase of voting machines, which eat our votes. HAVA provided 3.8 billion dollars of our money to the states to "upgrade" their voting equipment.
Please watch this video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2189785998591450323
And don't forget to vote. The good thing is, that stealing elections is tricky business. If the polls going into an election are predicting a landslide for one candidate, and the other candidate wins, it raises suspicions. The people at the Velvet Revolution are offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone stealing an election. If we all voted on November 7th there would be quite a few landslides and we just might get our democracy back.
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New York is the last state to implement the HAVA, and we are coming up to [what should be] the last election that will use our old, tried-and-true mechanical voting machines.
Rube Goldberg devices they may be, full of levers, rods, counters, and gears, but they are completely transparent. There is a clear connection -- literally -- between pulling a lever on the front of the machine and a counter clicking one more vote on the back. When they fail, it's a mechanical, repairable failure and not a politically motivated failure or sloppy programming.
Here's another link...to a Princeton University study of how a virus can be imported to, and transmitted between electronic voting machines.
If we have to have new voting machines, why aren't we seeing solutions using two machines from two vendors: the first machine helps the voter vote and produces a human-readable voting slip. The voter verifies the choices and puts the slip into the second machine, where the text is scanned, read, and counted. Any vendor's vote-assist machine should work with any other vendor's counting machine. And the paper can always, easily be counted by hand.
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