Honestly, wouldn’t voting go a helluva lot quicker and smoother if we all just reverted to paper ballots? There no way using paper to cast your vote could be worse than what happened today in Florida:
After an hour and a half, Zarella reported he was “almost inside the door.” However, according to those coming out at that time, “it was a big mess” with “machines breaking.”
It ultimately took Zarrella 3 hours and 15 minutes to get to the head of the line. “There are two machines that actually print out the ballots,” Zarrella explained, “and both of the machines went down for a period of about 45 minutes.”
Technical problems were also noted elsewhere in Florida on Monday. In Jacksonville, some of the vote scanning machines malfunctioned, and seven out of the fifteen had to be replaced because they were rejecting ballots. At Miami Beach City Hall, it was reported that “some of the computers used to check in voters weren’t working, though there were no problems with the optical scan machines used to count ballots.”
I bet paper ballots are cheaper, too.
You can put protocols in place to protect paper ballot security, but electronic machines? So easy to hack a high school drop out could do it.
No paper trail allowed.
Btw – that’s no joke. Florida has now FORBIDDEN recounts in close elections because they don’t want to be embarassed again, per Ion Sancho. How nutty is that??
Now imagine this scene replayed in every Democratic urban precinct in the country, with lines out the door for six, eight hours.
And the people who DO get to vote, get their vote switched.
NBC/WSJ poll shows Obama up ten nationally. Sarah Palin is now a bigger drag on the McSame ticket than Bush is. He should have no chance of winning in two weeks.
And yet most of us are expecting a race that will almost certainly come down to a single state again. We just don’t know what that state will be.
As I said in AG’s thread, I won’t count McSame out until the last recount lawsuit is settled.
If Obama becomes President, I would like to see an immediate plan to standardize voting across the country. This screwiness has gone on for far too long.
Obama should cite Bush v. Gore. It’s a federal election uniform federal standards should apply. All civilized countries have such a policy.
But that frightens me as well. What if the national standard becomes electronic machines? Our weak-willed Congress will do anything their money-toting lobbyists tell them to do, it seems.
HAVA was supposed to address this, but what has it done? Just sent voting into even more chaos.
That’s their plan. Chaos. Chaos in the markets, chaos in elections, chaos keeps the people wrapped up, tied down, and impotent.
It’s been beyond stupid-even before the bush/gore mess-that we don’t have a federal election standard across the country when we vote for president. Especially these long voting lines which infuriate me every damn election. WTF..the supposed richest country in the world(well maybe at one time)and we never can have enough machines..yeah I know it’s done on purpose but our voting system is a disaster all around and has been long before bush/gore.
I’m 100 % serious here. These machines are the greatest threat to our democrasy in existence. Why do we tolerate them?
Because most people don’t understand that computers have little men behind them. They think a computer is inherently honest. Naive fools.
by Robert F. Kennedy and Grep Palast
Block the Vote
Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?
I’ve seen links to this around, finally took the time to read it.
Many thanks.
The pull quote for me is from the election official in New Mexico who said: “As a strategic consideration,” he notes, “there are those that benefit from chaos”
Which means the neocons pull another fast one on the American public.
They will keep trying, and trying and trying to keep the reigns of power, and consolidate that power, and will not stop at creating a totalitarian state to maintain their power.
And counting paper ballots is faster. At least, it was in 1968 when machine counting was first introduced. Walter Cronkite had to apologize to the national audience for the slow speed of California returns because instead of counting ballots at the precinct, they now had to be driven to the county HQ to be counted by new IBM computers. It took LONGER to count the votes that way than without computers.
If the machines printing the ballots are breaking down, they must already be using paper ballots.
Print-on-demand is how our early voting is done here in Ohio, and it worked nicely when I went in to vote. You give them your address, they check your registration, then they print out a giant ballot for you to fill out (six pages this year in my city – yeesh).
But if the laser printers or the computers had broken down – it would have been borked. They had a lot of redundancy, but it still felt fragile to me.
Though I have to admit – it felt a helluva lot better than using those damn touch-screen Diebold machines they moved into my precinct four years ago. It was worth it to vote early just to avoid those poorly designed pieces of junk.
Ohio now has a Democratic Secretary of State and a Democratic Governor. I think those rules came into place post 2004. Not sure if Florida has the same rules, but I doubt it.