Reply #68: Welcome to DU! Unfortunately, there's spin everywhere, some of it

[autorank]

illegal, and I'm talking about alterations in the vote count due to any number of factors. The argent I believe is that the four National exit Polls showing a Kerry win were more accurate than the voting process/tabulation/reporting. Why, because the NEP had no apparent bias through the 12:22AM final poll and because there is an actual existing paper trail for the entire National/State Exit Poll. As far as the elections go, just look at OHIO (see this site to start
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com /
and New Mexico (this article is just one example of the many NM problems) http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00067.htm .

The exit poll pointers to fraud are just one piece of the larger picture which includes voter suppression, voting machine and tabulator vulnerability, outright political preference for right wing Republican views by the owners of the major voting machine companies, and the mack daddy of all arguments: if we can't see and count the votes ourselves, those politicians elected through privatized or even publicly owned voting machines are not legitimately elected. This is actually the simplest point. Once a vote enters a touch screen, it disappears from public scrutiny until that vote is aggregated and counted by tabulation software on private vendor software. The county and state election officials who buy voting machines and tabulation software almost always sign contracts that contain restrictions on examination of the methods and software on the machines. Hence, we've "outsourced" our elections to private companies who won't let us see our votes and who fight paper trails. Strange huh?

Welcome aboard. Election fraud research and action to counter it through supporting real election integrity (fully open and transparent election systems) is, IMHO, the most basic issue we face to preserve our democracy.