Dobbs: Voting machines put U.S. democracy at risk

[Bill Bored]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20/

Dobbs: Voting machines put U.S. democracy at risk

POSTED: 10:17 a.m. EDT, September 20, 2006
by Lou Dobbs, CNN

-snip-

Voters will be deciding whether the promise of challengers or the performance of incumbents merits their votes. The most recent polls reveal a national public mood that is now more supportive of a still unpopular president and about evenly divided over their preferences for, or tolerance of, congressional Republicans and Democrats. In other words, less than seven weeks before we go to the polls, there is every indication that the partisan quest for power on Capitol Hill will be close.

But there is additional uncertainty about the outcome of our elections that is intolerable and inexcusable, and which could make the contested 2000 presidential election look orderly by comparison. As of right now, there is little assurance your vote will count. As we've been reporting almost nightly on my broadcast for more than a year, electronic voting machines are placing our democracy at risk.

Across the nation, eight out of every 10 voters will be casting their ballots this November on electronic voting machines. And these machines time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error, and many of them have no voter-verified paper trail.

There is simply no way in which election officials and their staffs of thousands of volunteers with limited experience and often poor training can possibly carry out reliable recounts.

-snip-

[BeFree]

1. Reliable Recounts?!?

Dobbsie ol'boy, it isn't the recounts that are the big problem, its the first counts that are in doubt!

We should be so lucky to get the first counts right, what with the machines screwed up from the get-go. And with so many of the machines without a paper trail any first count or recount for that matter is pratically meaningless.

Besides, any fallback position is that a proper audit is made. No proper audit can ever take place with paperless balloting.

You'd think after a year of reporting on this you'd at least have those facts straight, but glad to see you are at least covering the story so that it is ON TV.

[Wilms]

2. K & R n/t