Reply #28: I (alone?) agree with you

[ArthurDent]

The DNC should let this be handled by others. While I'm skeptical about your 5th reason -- I don't think the cost and time will make Ohioans irate, or even be a good talking points for the GOP -- I'm willingto buy the other four: no evidence of fraud, actual evidence that exit polls were fraud, and the ridiculousness of the Connaly argument.

I've omitted your fourth reason because that's where I agree most.

Do as many recounts as you want, and you'll never find out how many people were victims of any systematic fraud.
* If the GOP pretended to register people to vote but never turned in the sheets, this won't turn up on a recount.
* If voter registration forms were stolen/destroyed w/o being processed, this won't turn up on a recount.
* Any voter who was denied the ability to cast a provisional ballot? They won't be shown in recounts.

The DNC should invest its own time and money into things like this. Kerry '04 (or more accurately, 1/20/05) is a losing cause and its advocation will end up hurting the party in the short and long run alike. On the other hand, actual work toward detecting, displaying, and preventing voter suppression would be significant.

As for Diebold issues, the lack of a paper trail is unfortunately not going to end until we're at a stage where it is clearly outcome determinative. There's nothing, to the public at large, problematic about an inexact system that very likely yields the intended result. There's anecodatal evidence of this. Florida probably used punch cards for ages before 2000. Once they learned the hard way that such things were unable to determine the winner of a close election, well, they went the way of the Dodo. Once a Diebold-using area has the same problem, the lack of a paper trail will come to light. The fact that it should happen before such a travesty is sadly a non-issue as it lacks realism. But eventually, and hopefully not catastrophically, everything will come to bear.