Keep our democracy strong

I have never really written much about this here. Didn't know if anyone really cared, but its gotten to a point that even my little voice might touch another person and bring attention to the fact that the electronic voting systems being built are just another boondoggle being shoved down the tax payers throats.

I just spotted this post on Slashdot, it summarizes an article on the Huffington Post. This article was about an interview with a representative of the Premier Corporation, a spin-off of the Diebold company, that now manufactures some of the voting machines used today.

To some this up, more money and engineering goes into developing ATM machines then the voting machines. Yes, we the people of the United States of American invest more money in boxes to distribute cash then we do on boxes that count our ballets. Cash > Freedom.

I realize that there are many issues that people think are very important. Healthcare, the economy and terrorism seem to top a lot of lists, but nothing really matters if our underlying freedoms and democracy disappear.

I, personally, find this whole torrid affair of giving billions of dollars to a couple of huge corporations to be criminal and lacking any respect for the foundation of this nation or the people.

If your local election officials start talking about buying electronic voting systems, please do the research and then let the officials know that these machines aren't ready. Its a complete waste of money. Read the articles I've attached and the read the ones they are linked to. You should see soon enough...these machines are worthless.

At times, it seems only the geeks that read the tech sites know of this problem. When I've talked to people about this, many have no idea what I'm talking about. There is great disbelief that it could be as bad as the geeks are saying, but watch the videos. The machines can be hacked in seconds, yes, seconds. The used the standard key that ever office has to open the cheap file cabinets. Yes, that one.

With no audit trail, there is no way to verify that a machine had been tampered with. Want Obama/Clinton/McCain/Nader/O'Brien to win? Rig the machine. It ain't hard. You thought hanging chads were a problem, you ain't seen nothing yet.