Why You Should Vote Absentee

Congress's "Help America Vote" is a nightmare. NPR's Science Friday ran a story on this--electronic voting with no paper trail is NOT SECURE. "Significant vulnerablities" is a direct quote of one of the guest speakers. The companies that create these voting machines make it illegal for people to check to make sure the machines work properly by calling the machines "intellectual property" so you can't open them up to check them. None of these machines print out a copy of the voter's "punches" for backup. With no way to have a secondary way to verify the accuracy of the vote counts, the system is open to tampering and fraud and can be manipulation by hackers. Argh!

I guess I still live in the dark ages, we still use a paper ballot that you draw a line with a marker to complete the arrow! LOL!! Of course, I don't mind going to the polls to vote on the actual day. No waiting for our 2 booths, and I often sit and gossip with the 4 ladies running it for a hour or two (including my mother-in-law, who has her grandbaby brag book on the table right next to where you sign in so EVERYONE can see it). No one has to show their ID, because we know everyone.

I heard a joke the other day concerning YK2:
I'm glad I live in Eastern New Mexico or West Texas. Since we are 20 years behind the times, the Y2K bug won't affect us for a while. LOL! Ain't it the truth! Our ballots are still counted by hand!

Georgia was one of the first states to introduce electronic voting. I heard on the state news yesterday that a bill has been introduced to create a paper trail by printing a paper reciept for each vote, but the Secretary of State's office has said that they don't have the ability to do that. I can't find a non-partisan site to get a good reading on this issue. (It's not smart to believe everything you read from either side.)