by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Ah, the conspiracy theories start to ooze their way out of the woodwork...or at least that is what I thought when I first read this article about votes and voter registrations. Now, upon giving it a little more thought, I'm not sure if it is all that far-fetched. Personally, I want this to be over and for us to get on with our lives...except that I do remember the years 1972-74. A sitting Republican President was driven from office for...campaign illegalities and the coverup that ensued. If this is true--if there are actual voting irregularities that can be laid at the feet of...whoever it was who wanted Bush reelected so badly that they would subvert the election...then, perhaps, we do need to do this again.

Here's the thing about paper ballots--specifically, paper punch card ballots--the card readers are hard wired. That is, their programming is physically built into the machines and cannot be hacked from the outside. If they are set to print out results, on a paper form, then these can be gathered, collated and entered, by hand, into other machines which are not connected to the internet. Rather, the machines involved in vote collation should be on a secure, WAN that is totally dedicated to just this one purpose. It would be relatively simple to ensure that no unauthorized person gained access to these networks in the various states. That way we could have a secure election without much chance of electronic fraud. (Oh yeah, and those touchscreen machines could be set to print a receipt each time the "vote" button was pushed. The voter would then take that receipt and deposit it in a secure ballot box attached to the machine. Then if there were any questions about the electronic totals reported by individual machines, those could be checked against the actual paper ballots printed by the machine.) People, it ain't all that fucking difficult.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005