Who’s the “you” there? Annaplurabelle? I don’t think she’s ready to convict yet. To my mind, the numbers don’t match, and that’s sufficient to want to figure out why. Not to start claiming fraud, but to figure out why. Analogous to saying there’s sufficient evidence to get a warrant, but not enough to indict.
Is this guy encouraging me to shoot Tony Blair?
This is a very good question. I don’t think there is any good / respectable / aboveboard reason for any state to have switched from whatever they had before to these unverifiable black box voting machines. If you choose an unreliable method, there should be a suspicion that your motive is a desire to make election fraud possible. So that you can endulge in it, if in your opinion, the need arises. If you really purchased black box voting out of ignorance, you still need to justify the failure to either scrap the machines or install a paper trail capacity. As others have said, if we use electionic voting, we need to be sure it is as reliable as ATMs.
Also, if state officials do not realize until just before an election that they have allowed themselves to be stuck with unreliable voting methods, they always have the option to just use old-fashioned paper ballots. And hand count them, if optical scanners can’t be trusted. Nevermind if this is slow. What’s the rush? What matters is holding an honest, glitch-free election.
The Floridia fiasco of 2000 made it plain that punch card voting and butterfly ballots should not be used. So what did we do? In many districts, we moved to something even worse: black box voting. When are we going to enact real election reform?