We need our
PUBLIC voting process out of the hands of
PRIVATE corporate proprietary trade secrets.
We need a transparent vote count method that is not rushed.
We need a National holiday for voting on a Friday or Monday and the polls opened for 3 days over the weekend.
We PUBLIC financing of our election process to cut out the special interest lobbying.
Term limits will not fix it because the professional lobbyists will remain and a fresh batch of "greenhorn" Congressmen will be thrown to them.
The system needs a total overhaul.
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http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/synopsis.html
"Diebold software, or other software like it, is installed in thousands of counties across 32 states. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, says the problem is that there are "lots of people involved in writing the software, and lots of people who could have touched the software before it went into that machine. If one of those people put something malicious in the software and it's distributed to all the machines, then that one person could be responsible for changing tens of thousands of votes, maybe even hundreds of thousands, across the country."
In Florida, Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho presided over a trial "mini-election" to see if the vote could be hacked without being detected. Before votes were actually cast, computer analyst Harri Hursti "stuffed the ballot box" by entering votes on the computer's memory card. Then, after votes were cast, the results displayed when the same memory card was entered in the central tabulating program indicated that fraud was indeed possible. In other words, by accessing a memory card before an election, someone could change the results - a claim Diebold had denied was possible.
Ultimately, Bev Harris' research proved that the top-secret computerized systems counting the votes in America's public elections are not only fallible, but also vulnerable to undetectable hacking, from local school board contests to the presidential race. With the electronic voting machines of three companies - Diebold, ESS and Sequoia - collectively responsible for around 80 percent of America's votes today, the stakes for democracy are high.http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/index.html