Airman, you’re clearly a intelligent guy, but you puzzle the heck out of me sometimes. I’ve tried to tell you this, others have tried to tell you this, maybe it will succeed this time. Now, please read this carefully.
One of the scariest things about the electronic voting machines with no paper trail is that the software used to tally the votes can be constructed to overwrite itself at the end of the day. That means there’s not going to be any evidence. Not last time, not this time, not ever. Arguably, one person centrally located could set this up; that’s not exactly a big conspiracy. The voting machines must be updated for each election. Therefore they are open to some fairly centralized manipulation. This is a fact, not some kind of tin-foil hattery.
Has there been election fraud in the past? I have no idea. But if there was, that says nothing about whether or not there was election fraud this year, and it says nothing about future elections. I repeat, the voting machines must be updated for each election.
The particularly frightening thing about these machines is that election manipulation can take place on a very large scale without paper and with very few people involved. It is therefore not comparable to ballot stuffing, people voting without valid IDs, or even poorly designed butterfly ballots. The potential here is huge, and I say again, if done correctly, will leave no evidence. I’m speaking here as someone who has been a computer programmer for thirty years - in short, exactly the kind of person who could do the work if I had the right job and no morals.
WHY in the name of Og would you appear to be unwilling to take measures against this kind of election-stealing, whether or not it has yet occurred? Because regardless of whether or not it has in the past, I can flatly promise you that if things remain as they are now, with no verifiable paper trail, this kind of fraud will occur in the future. And if all you ever do is sit there and say “prove it,” then you can kiss democracy goodbye in the long run.
As for you, xtisme, I swear most fundamentalist Christians have less faith in Jesus than you have in the concept of incompetent government versus competent private enterprise. What makes you so sure that government and industry differ so in ability? The employees of large corporations are exactly comparable to those in government; they have equally little stake in the outcome of the entity as a whole and they are just as hard to fire.
The RFPs you rail against were done locally. The small governmental entities that were responsible for purchasing voting machines were every bit as accountable and probably far more vulnerable to the consequences of a bad decision than the corporations you apparently admire so much. The marketplace does a pretty good job of punishing small businesses for incompetence (as long as you’re not very rich or well-connected to begin with), but the electorate does a pretty good job of punishing small government entities for incompetence as well.
By all means, believe what you want. But realize it’s as much an article of faith as any creationist’s wet dream.
Either you didn’t read what I wrote (the most likely scenerio), or I wrote it very poorly indeed (possible, as I didn’t really go into a lot of detail I suppose). I KNOW the government is incompetent when it comes to contracting, and that the contractors are corrupt and will get away with anything the government lets them get away with. This isn’t faith based…its reality based.