If your money was in a bank which had the safe guards of a "voting machine", you would be dead broke

[wcepler]

This is not an exaggeration! Banks and Las Vegas slot machines are incomparably more secure than pug corporation voting machines (Diebold comes to mind!).

That's the thing about voting machine safe guards: they’re aren't any. Duh.

Would you put your money in a bank a high school student could hack into to clean out your balance? Believe me; it wouldn't take long for there to be a hacker run on the bank and bye bye savings, checking account, identity, etc.

However, "hacker" really isn't the word since this conjures the image of a super accomplished computer criminal and NOTHING like this is needed for strolling through the wide open doors of voting machines. They have everything but manuals on the net that say do A, B, C, & D and then bye, bye, not money this time, but registered Democrats (or liberal Democrats such as in the New Hampshire primary).

These machines are beyond absurdity. They are electronic junk, pure and simple, and it is literally AGAINST THE LAW for banks to have such zero protection for our hard earned money.

Well then, what about our hard earned votes?

The rest of the world must be looking at us with total disbelief. To think we would simply hand over our country to neo Nazi elites because of high-school-hackable Republican voting machines is a patriotic mortal sin. Said differently, it's 100% OUR FAULT if we let them do this for eight straight years.

Barnyard animals know the year 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections were stolen. During these elections, even the pugs were shocked that they carried certain states that the dems had 100% locked up. More recently, they also know Hillary Clinton was voting-machine- conjured into a phony lead in the New Hampshire primaries because she’s the most corporate/neocon Democrat in Washington. Hey, she’s just pug “insurance”.

There's more to it than this, of course. There's also the Bush/fascist strategy of fouling the nest of voter logistics, e.g., making certain voters virtually tell officials how many times they had sex last month to get to vote, or pushing wheelbarrows of "identification" to even get in the building. And literally hundreds of other voters blocking strategies.

The worst case scenario of all is that most of these machines were constructed to "automatically" ignore, switch, or exaggerate votes. Of course, since they are black box voting machines, there's no way we can get quality computer pros into the system to dig out convolutedly embedded and criminal programs.

In short, we are totally f______ UNLESS we massively and immediately mount a NO COMPROMISE way to either "get inside" these black box one party voting machines or, better yet, simply TRASH THEM ALL.

Forget about the logistic problems. This problem has a simple and perfect solution. Paper voting, paper voting, paper voting -- where we have records of EVERYTHING.

If we go back to the bank comparison, it is beyond dementia that we just sit back and watch our money/votes be stolen from us without even the spark of a fight.

But for this we don't need a spark, we need a conflagration of national rage to DO WHATEVER WE HAVE TO DO to guarantee that 2008 will be the first free and fair election in eight years!

Which means what? Well, when you're fighting for your life and your elected representatives have totally abandoned you (e.g., the Bush sucking up Democratic Congress), than it's time for out of the box, creative apolitical hard ball. No more nicey nice.

If we sit on our thumbs with this one, we're going to be living in a Dictator of the Rich police state forever. The American Dream will be DEAD and we will never, never have a second chance to save our country and the Earth.

This is the big one folks -- the last one. Now or never.
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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>

[greenvpi]

1. As bad as the voting machines are...

I'll still have to disagree with you. You only think banks and ATM's are safe because you haven't read about their problems in detail like you have with voting machines. When I worked on ATM's, they were somewhat secure. Now more and more of them run Microsoft garbage. As far as other processes like handling wires and withdrawals, there's still huge holes in the system. The tellers are on the front line of securing your money, and most of them are very unmotivated due to low pay.

Voting machines are horrible but not unexpectedly so when you look at other technology systems. That's why we need to keep things simple. Whenever you make things overly complicated it will screw-up. A simple machine with real buttons(rather than touchscreens that don't work in the real world) that pushes a counter like an odometer in a car when you press a larger button to confirm your vote simply works. How often do you see Microsoft screw-up your computer versus how often the odometer in a car fails? Now you have companies that are trying to give as much money to Microsoft as they can and trying to make the machines as complicated and thus as expensive as possible. Those machines always fail.

[MasonJar]

2. It is true that the elections of 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 were fixed, but that

does not mean that the NH primary was. The folks in NH are quite independent and many women switched their votes to Clinton. Many independents voted for McCain.