Well, I gave away the whole point in the title, but you're here anyways!
The military-industrial complex and the big corporations have been very much aware that some people know that the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen, and that many people are angry with the black box voting machines that make mass election rigging child's play. So they have had their Plan B in place for years to deal with public outrage, should it ever arise.
As usual, rather than sacrifice a corrupt system that benefits them to the tune of trillions of dollars annually, they will make some cosmetic reforms to the system, enough to let people think there is hope when there really is none. This time it takes the form of paper trails and open source software that will leave the hackable voting machines in place and permit another stolen Presidential election in 2008. The Democratic Party, Common Cause, and many other large organizations are rallying around HR550 which calls for paper trails, or calling for open source software.
The problem with open source or paper trails is that both systems require painstaking and time-consuming recounts in order to verify that no tampering has taken place. A vote cast on a voting machine may look right on the touch screen and on the paper trail, but may not actually be counted as cast when the central tabulator tallies the votes. With open source software elections officials, poll workers who take the machines home with them, and anyone else with access and programming skills can tamper with the election, but only experts can examine the software afterwards to determine if corrupt code had changed the results and then erased itself.
During the time the public is asking for a recount, and the experts are examining the software, the wrong candidate can be installed. As we saw in 2000 and 2004, there is no remedy once they are sworn in. Experts can prove conclusively that the elections were stolen, they can rant, rave, publish their studies, go on radio and TV, blog, write books, but many will still dismiss them as conspiracy theorists or sore losers and the losing candidate will still remain in power.
The solution we need was introduced in Congress in September:
Paper Ballot Act of 2006 (Introduced in House)
HR 6200 IH
109th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. R. 6200
To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require States to conduct Presidential elections using paper ballots and to count those ballots by hand, and for other purposes
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
September 27, 2006
Lots more good details at the link!
This is something thats bothered me for a long time. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it rather defeats the point of a transparent democracy when candidates may concede before experts locate the evidence of fraud.
Definately something to support! Won't help against the OTHER Republican tactics-robocalls, misleading mailings, voter intimidation, etc. but at least it'll somewhat help with the Diebold machines promising elections to Republicans, and sealing up records that may show what happened to KEEP that promise...
Either way, in this instance, technology is NOT our friend.
Good old transparent paper ballots! Would be nice to put some sort of national ballot through as well, with specific spots for various state and local races.... Help prevent confusion from poorly designed ballots, or deliberately confusing ballots....
Thinking of confusion.... THink the 06 midterms were clean? Think again.
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Fair elections are the staple in a democraacy.
If there is a way to make sure each paper ballot belongs to a legal voter that has voted only 1 time!
http://wheresyourbrain.blogspot.com/
They're safer than e-voting.
Frankly, most of the problems within our voting arises when a party decides to subvert democracy and suppress the vote or chage votes.
There ought to be stiffer penalties for breaking laws.
This goes for Dems or Republicans. Even though within the last 10 years most of the election problems have been performed by Republicans, many years prior to that, the democrats had been corrupt.
However, if someone cheats there should be serious punishment which should include jail time and reparations to the taxpayers.