Reply #49: Thanks, but remember you don't need to be an attorney

[Land Shark]

to "launch your own land shark". Just think about all the reasons why no person of any party can reasonably find secret vote COUNTING (as opposed to secret ballots) to be acceptable.

If we simply take the People through this simple thinking process, it is only a question of how much time it will take before secret vote counting is gone.

Bottom line is that the winner almost never sees a problem with the elections (except for Christopher Hitchens in the March 05 Vanity Fair who didn't support Kerry but sees huge problems in Ohio) so it is the perspective of the loser that is most relevant to deciding if a system has the confidence of the public.

And I can't see why any INFORMED loser (at least) would EVER accept a computer based result in a close election, ESPECIALLY with secret vote counting but very likely even with "open source code" because one still needs to verify that source code was the same on all machines, there was no intrusion, etc..... And if the Pentagon can not protect its computers from intrusion, what is the cost for our elections to do the same level of "protection"? Machines are also expensive bottlenecks that can create huge lines, while with paper ballots in a pinch you can vote it on your lap or against a wall and GET ON WITH the rest of your day.

Computers are wonderful, there are some limits though to where they are appropriate to use, that's all. The biggest divide on this issue is between people who love computers and are still wowed by them vs people who love computers but see that there are some limitations and risks that make them inappropriate for voting.