CBS: Will Your Super Tuesday Vote Even Count?

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." — Josef Stalin (1879-1953), Communist Tyrant and Mass Murderer

This article written for The Raw Story generated a fair bit of discussion on the Digg forums the days surrounding the Super Tuesday vote on Feb. 5, 2008.

From the discussions, there still seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding the problems with electronic voting machines—even with a paper trail receipt. In electronic voting, there is simply no way of verifying that the paper trail which corresponds to one's vote actually corresponds to the digital imprint in the voting machines memory. It is relatively easy for a savvy computer programmer to hack the system so that it prints out on paper what one expects, but actually tallies and records internally in another way altogether.

These considerations aside, reams of evidence suggesting election fraud on the part of Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, and Advance Voting Solutions, have already been collected by the excellent grassroots elections watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org. They've provided documents and video footage containing expert testimony from a number of credible individuals including security professionals, computer scientists, researchers, professors, and others.

Affiliates of BlackBoxVoting.org shot this video after the New Hampshire primary in January, 2008. The video shows evidence of tampering on ballot boxes, and a complete breakdown of the chain of custody—a clear violation of the public trust.

There is a large body of evidence to strongly suggest that individuals have already manipulated election results in Florida 2000 (Gore & Bush), in Ohio 2004 (Kerry & Bush), and again in the 2006 mid-term elections. In fact, several individuals were convicted of election fraud in Ohio surrounding the 2004 election [2,3]. There is also legal testimony [4,5] to this effect.

All this being the case, should we, in good conscience, tolerate black box technology or chain of custody which may result in the popular vote not being counted? Or even worse, changed?

References:

1. http://uscountvotes.org/
2. http://www.freepress.org/...
3. http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/...
4. http://www.bbvforums.org/...
5. http://www.electionfraudnews.com/...
6. http://www.youtube.com/...
7. http://www.BlackBoxVoting.org/
8. http://www.truthout.org/...
9. http://freepress.org/...
10. http://globalresearch.ca/...
11. http://www.harpers.org/...
12. http://www.projectcensored.org/...
13. http://www.alternet.org/...
14. http://www.iwantmyvote.com/...
15. http://coalition4visibleballots.homestead.com/
16. http://www.solarbus.org/...