Why Bush won illegally and what we can do to stop it from happening again.

It is rather hard to hack paper ballots, and rather easy to hack a diebold machine. The paper ballots worked well in Florida 2000. YES Thats right, I said they worked well. What did not work well was the fact that billions of corporate dollars were funding a large media push to discredit their validity.

In addition, I recall reading a certain article placed on page A29 of my local paper in mid November of 2000. The Secretary of State in Florida, who initially called the election for Bush, had years before had an affair with Governor Jeb Bush. Wow! No conflict of interest there! While I must give the publication credit for exposing this item, I must also blast the media establishment as a whole for never bringing it further into the nation's attention.

Ballots must be returned to paper form and all media outlets must return to a non profit status. Do not misunderstand me here. I do not support any action that reduces the salaries our journalists or other media support personnel currently make. I simply state that, as journalism is the only profession specifically mentioned in the Constitution, it ought to be comprised of non profit industries rather than corporate conglomerates. It has become all too easy for large media conglomerates to merely report the news that will serve them well with their stockholders.

The invalid ballots counted for him and the ballots in Seminole County that had been tampered with, have he not had those in his count Gore would be President,

and to think that in reality Gore was the one more Americans voted for ...

Actually, paper ballots are fairly easy to hack, and unlike a computer, they can be hacked by people without specific skills. There is a long history of throwing elections they were conducted with paper ballots that proves this. No, the real problem with computer voting machines is that they allow a hack remotely and by a very small number of people. The real solution is to have computerized voting machines that produce un-hackable paper ballots, thereby combining the systems for the best of both worlds. Computerized machines give you multilingual ballots in a snap and are more handicap accessible. Paper ballots produced by these machine could eliminate over and under voting and protect against forgery and fraud.

there is no need for handicap access. There is no need for precincts. All you need is to count them, twice. First by one party's reps, say Republicans and another verifying count by the Democratic Party reps. Both counts should be very close.

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Some of the ways the absentee vote system can break down:


Ballots can be lost or damaged in the mail.

Ballots can be ignored. In Florida's Broward County, investigators who had heard stories of widespread negligence in the elections office found 268 uncounted absentee ballots from a September 2002 primary in the back of a file drawer.

In Florida and most other places, absentee ballots are machine-readable optical scan ballots. Stray marks, food stains, odd colored inks or other problems can prevent ballots from being read properly by the automated system.

When ballots require manual interpretation, that "opens the door to subjective judgment, and canvassing boards have been known to be biased," Jones says.

Absentee voters miss out on the chance to correct errors such as voting for two competing candidates. When optical scan machines are used at the polling place, such problems can be detected, allowing the voter to complete a new ballot.

In Florida particularly, there's a long history of absentee votes being discarded or manipulated. Hacking the absentee vote can be decidedly low-tech. The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for showing how fraudulent absentee votes swung a 1997 mayoral election in Miami. In one of the most colorful scams, campaign workers armed with boxes of absentee ballots paid homeless citizens $10 a vote to support their candidate.

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http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1640826,00.asp

(While I disagree with this article's completely negative tone regarding paper, it has many good points regarding the problems with absentee balloting)