Hand-counted paper ballots: the 21st century solution to stolen elections

[Fly by night]

Today, in states that continue to use DREs to conduct their elections, voters will wait for hours to vote when it should only take them minutes. (DREs are 10-15 times slower to complete the voting process than a paper ballots/optical scan process.) Their counties will continue to pay 40-50% more to conduct elections on DREs than on paper ballots/opscan (according to studies in Florida and North Carolina). AND, at the end of the day, voters who voted on DREs will continue to have to accept the "trust us" statements issued by Cheshire Cat-grinning reich-wing dominionists who own the voting machine companies. Anyone who continues to argue that we must continue to use unverifiable, proprietary voting machines to measure the "consent of the governed" in any democracy is continuing to pull a con to try to rob us once again.

Having worked to do away with DREs in Tennessee (and everywhere else) for the past six years, I have begrudgingly supported a switch to paper ballots counted by optical scan machines and then re-counted manually in randomly selected precincts to verify the accuracy and honesty of the opscans. Today, I have another idea.

Let's take ALL proprietary voting equipment out of our elections (as many other countries are now doing). Let's vote on paper ballots that are hand-counted by high school Honor Society members who are paid with pizzas and cold drinks AND for the honor of announcing what the "consent of the governed" truly is in their precincts.

It would greatly lower election costs, increase trust in our elections AND very likely increase the participation in elections by young people -- historically the age-group with the lowest turnout.

I was honored to meet Andy Stephenson at the 2005 National Election Reform Conference held in Nashville. Andy was right then to promote hand-counted paper ballots.

He is still right today (may the Goddess rest his soul.)