Recording @ MindSay

But when the people of a town, city or state exert their right to vote without open, honest elections and with a secret ballot they run the risk of choosing cowards and fools to public office; who will lead us into wars, do away with simple protections, destroy our families and children, promote slavery, use torture and mercenaries whenever they feel it necessary, murder the Americans they are supposed to protect, and leave our borders wide open? If those are not the ideals you hope to attain, then perhaps you were not voting as instructed on the State's machines. It is necessary to educate people to think differently.

Officials are supposedly standing guard in every county and state to help avoid electronic or other electoral fraud from occurring. The idea is to protect fair and honest elections with secret ballots, so that no citizen is intimidated when they vote. These official protections were deemed necessary since electoral fraud has an ancient tradition and those who crave for power and control of our government are constantly seeking new ways of changing outcomes, either by commission or omission. There are individuals and even small groups of voters who are not above using deliberate trickery to gain an advantage and give a few more votes to the candidate they favor.

Although voting machines have been around for decades, they were proven to be noisy, heavy and hard to move around. As a result, their use was fairly limited.

Counting votes on punched cards by computers . . . The beginning of the new millennium, combined with an abrupt and violent collapse that brought on disastrous consequences of the 2000 election, brought in new dangers in the form of electronic voting machines whose technical complexity is beyond the knowledge of local election officials. Control of elections by state and federal government was also increased. These changes were falsely designed to increase the convenience and decrease the cost of elections.

One of the biggest complaints relating to these electronic voting machines, is the lack of a paper trail with which to verify results. Even worse, these new machines are susceptible to hackers, or deceitful programmers.

In practice the results of these changes have often been disastrous and public trust in elections and official has dropped sharply. Still, election officials exerted force on citizens to vote on these machines and insist they, and the voting machine companies, know what is best. With this they screeched out a high-pitched noise, You shall trust us.

The Registrar of Voters Tony Anchundo, who in the November 2006 election in California, requested and expected voters to wait in long lines to vote on Direct Recording Electronic and instructed poll workers to refrain from revealing to the voters that they may ask for a paper ballot and avoid the wait. Of course, the voters blindly trusted Anchundo only to discover that it was obviously a bad idea. Hence, he pled guilty of 43 criminal counts, including charges of forgery, fraudulent appropriation of funds, embezzlement, altering of accounts and grand theft of nearly $80,000 of the county’s monies.

Still, election officials are demanding that we vote on these ancient machines and have faith in the results. The method by which an election can be stolen isn't as important as the fact that electronic voting with a capital "V" inflates like dough the means by which election fraud can be accomplished while taking away protections that in other times existed. Counting votes electronically in a black box in large measure makes ineffective the morality of a secret ballot. We have climbed from a secret ballot to a secret count. If the members of our state or other political communities cannot verify that ballots are counted precisely then to manipulate the vote count in the black box is fairly easy to imagine.

Another problem is that the election officials have been shown to be arithmetically challenged. When Direct Recording Electronic voting was introduced, a couple to none of them had taken the time necessary or used intelligence to perform the simple calculation that shows only about 70 voters are able to use one Direct Recording Electronic in a typical 12-hour voting day. (An example - 12 hours = 720 minutes, averages 10 minutes for each voter to vote = 72 voters per machine. This process forces citizens to stand in line for hours to vote on unreasonably costly machines the people do not trust, and that have proven to be unpopular.)

Another cunning maneuver to gain an advantage created by Help America Vote Act is a voter’s registration database for citizens to confirm that they are registered in the database, what about the fraudulent registrations? Any hacker, contractor, or administrator can easily add as many registered voters they want to add, where in the past, those contemplating election frauds had to literally corrupt each county’s voter registration database. Today, they can corrupt a whole state with one hack.

To worsen the problem, most nearby regions also permit citizens to register by mail. When one uses this method, the citizen may mail in as many voter registration forms as her or he would like. Except when the ones who commit an illegal action are so careless as to mail in all the registrations in a single envelope, and all in the same handwriting. Once a mail registration form is accepted, the wrongdoers simply requests an absentee ballot and votes it. Naturally, signature verification on the mail ballot matches the signature on the fraudulent form. The situation is worsened by the use of electronic polls books, particularly when those e-poll books are using wireless communications.

As the use of no excuse absentee ballots went to 50% or more of all ballots cast in many elections, rather than fix the underlying problems many election officials proposed holding elections entirely by mail. Excuses like cost and convenience was put forth as justification for using such an admittedly fraud-prone method of voting. However, cost and convenience, particularly for election officials, should not be of real importance in such a fundamental process.