Reply #7: Here's my LTE:

[Peace Patriot]

Dear Editor:

Thank you for the article by Rob Zaleski, “Voting Glitches Haunt Statistician” (3/4/05). I’ve read the report that Dr. Joiner helped write, with eight other Ph.D. co-authors, for USCountVotes.org, and the other reports he mentions, and I agree with Dr. Joiner’s grave concern about our election system. What to do now? We must achieve a transparent, auditable voting system, where peoples’ votes don’t just disappear into the electronic ether. It’s doubtful that we can achieve that with the current electronic voting machines, which are extremely insecure. Please see Republican hacker Chuck Herrin’s easy demo on how insecure these machines are, at http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm.

At the very least, we need open source code and a “Voter Verified Paper Ballot” (an official record of the vote to use in recounts and audits)--and mandatory audits. The idea that our voting machines are run on secret, proprietary source code, owned and controlled by major partisans of the Bush regime is seriously alarming. And that many Democratic leaders seem to have gone along with this—an inherently fraud-prone voting system—is also deeply troubling.

I think vote counting should be seeable by human eyes, and occur at human speed, and everybody should be able to understand how it’s done—not just experts. If we can’t make this electronic voting system transparent, we need to go back to a paper ballot/hand counting system.

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Note: I wanted to get this out quickly, so I didn't mention the OTHER issue that Dr. Joiner brings up--the blackout on this story in the news media. Very important. Someone else here should cover it.