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They have a paper ballot, but 99% of those ballots are never counted. They are run through a scanner and turned into highly manipulable electrons. No human hands and eyes count them. Some states do NO audit of them at all. And even the best of states do only a 1% audit (automatic hand count to check for fraud or error). Venezuela uses electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they additionally hand count a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud or error. Our system is pathetic, next to Venezuela's. It is extremely insecure (including touchscreens, optiscans and central tabulators--and including absentee ballots, which are merely scanned right into the highly riggable, 'TRADE SECRET' electronics). It is all run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by corporations whose ties to extreme rightwing causes would make your hair stand on end.
Are we nuts, or what?
Some experts say 10% is the MINIMUM needed to detect fraud. We are not even close to the minimum needed. If we were to require a 100% audit, with the optiscans (everyone gets a paper ballot), for the first couple of election cycles, then 55% after that (or, at minimum, 10%), THEN you could say that optiscans are good and touchscreens (DREs) are bad. Without a bigger audit, optiscans are nearly as bad as DREs, and they lure people into thinking that their votes are safe, when they are not.
Optiscans may have some preventive effect against 'TRADE SECRET' fraud, since a recount could occur, but recounts are costly and very hard to get (and even then generally involve only 3% of the vote). So it's only slightly more risky for fraudsters. In an election like the one we just had, where interest is super-high, and where the progressive campaign is on high alert, with thousands of lawyers ready to pounce on irregularities, and millions of citizens aware of potential fraud and gearing up the pitchforks, the election theft corporations were wise to let Obama win. They could preserve their machines--their election theft capability--and concentrate on giving him a difficult, Puke/'Blue Dog'-infested Congress (like the present one, of the 10% approval rating), and of course their buds on Wall Street have already inflicted him with their Financial 9/11. His hands will be tied in many ways, as to helping "the little guy." Turmoil and civil disorder could result; certainly a lot of suffering. Then these Corpo/Fascists could come back, in 2012, and install their favorite nazi (and we may already know her name).
It is these facts that prompted me to call this OP "idiotic." How can anyone support 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting, by Buswhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls (optiscan or DRE)? It is insane. They have the capability--the EASY capability--of doing everything I described above, and more. And now people like this poster are going to come along, and say, "See, electronics are fine. Obama won!"--and do their P.R. work for them, of selling us on unaudited optiscans!
What stupidity!
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