California now has printed ballots.

[Initech]

I voted this morning and noticed something rather unusual - the voting machines have printers! They will print out your ballot now! This is the first time I've felt good about my vote since they've had those damn machines installed.

This should be required in any state that has those machines.

PRINT! COUNT! VERIFY!!!!

[katty]

1. Me too!! in Santa Monica-DIE-bold FREE ZONE

[Peace Patriot]

2. The machines are run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code,

owned and controlled by Bushite corporations, and are extremely insecure and insider hackable. They can be programmed to report one thing on your "receipt" and send something quite different to the central electronic tabulators. In California--whose elections are being run by Diebold shill Bruce McPherson (APPOINTED by Schwarzenegger)--the state conducts only a 1% audit (comparison of ballots/receipts with electronic totals), an extremely inadequate audit in this secretive, high speed environment, that can ALSO be hacked (to be selective in where auditing occurs). Recounts--the other possible check on fraud--are extremely expensive, difficult to obtain, and rare.

Do not be fooled by the sop of paper "receipts" or even real paper ballots (as in the optiscans). They provide only a minor element of transparency, and perhaps some minor deterrent effect. The system remains EXTREMELY riggable. And the only question is, how much rigging will the fascists who run these e-voting corporations risk?--the risk being loss of their election theft system for future purposes, to citizen outrage, if they are too blatant about it.

We need to proceed--and to strategize for getting our country back--on the basis of truth and reality. We must not allow ourselves to be fooled, even by a Dem victory today. A modest Dem victory may well be what the Corporate Rulers have in mind, to quiet the natives down and dampen calls for election reform. Until election transparency is fully restored, we do not really have a democracy. We can try to balance things out a bit, by working our butts, as we have this time, and by helping to empower the SEVENTY PERCENT American MAJORITY that despises Bush and his war, but consider this: Why isn't that 70% majority reflected in our candidates' positions (on the whole), and why do we NOT expect it to be adequately reflected in the new Congress? The reason is that Diebold/ES&S--and also the absolutely filthy campaign contribution/lobbying system--control the primaries as well as the general elections. These two elements have already dictated a NON-democratic (with a small d) majority in Congress, that will endlessly play around with Iraq "withdrawal" scenarios, for instance, but take no definitive action on it (like withholding funds). In the current elections, where an edge can be given to Bushites and warmongers, it will be. And we will probably end up with a Congress that has a Dem majority in the House, but one with a strong element of "Bushite Democrats," like the ones who voted for torture and suspension of habeas corpus the other week, who will be the swing voters; and probably a tied Senate, with Joe Lieberman holding tremendous power (--in favor of the war profiteers).

This is what happens when you have NON-TRANSPARENT vote counting. This is WHY we HAVE non-transparent vote counting. And it is not going to change significantly until we RESTORE TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING.

I think we can do it--working at the local level--with the huge Absentee Ballot voting protest--a voter rebellion against the machines--as our leverage. But it's not going to be easy. We need to pressure local officials to, a) HAND COUNT the Absentee Ballot votes, and b) POST the results BEFORE any electronics are involved. We need to then extend these principles to the optiscan ballots. And we will thus have created a paper ballot system BY DEFAULT. This strategy avoids a head-on collision with corrupt officials and e-voting corporations, and I think is the most potentially successful one. The election reform movement has been great on raising consciousness, but not great on coming up with a strategy to achieve our goal. Ordinary voters, in their big rebellion against the machines all across the country in these elections, are pointing way.

[Boo Boo]

3. How do you know your vote was recorded as shown?

The output from the printer is the same as the output displayed on the screen. If the screen shows your votes correctly then obviously the printed copy will too. So What? How do you know that your votes were actually recorded as they are shown on the screen or on your printout? It doesn't matter how many different ways you display the information; if it isn't the same as what gets saved on the memory card, you're screwed.

You have to trust the system. There is no way around that.

There are two major things wrong with computer voting: 1) There is no actual ballot. 2) The current systems are poorly engineered, prone to failure, and have serious security flaws. The second problem can be solved, the first one cannot.

I vote absentee in CA, because then I'm sure to get a real paper ballot that I mark with a pen. If there is ever a recount, then the original ballot, that I marked myself, is counted again. One can do a small test run to verify that the scanning machines are correctly recording votes (by comparing with the actual ballots), and then all the votes can be counted again. Or, if one really wants to go all the way, the ballots can be counted by hand.