From the Styx by Peggy Tibbetts

Check out this BBC America report by investigative reporter Greg Palast:

Steal Back Your Vote is a downloadble comic book by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, with cartoonists Ted Rall, Lloyd Dangle, and Lukas Ketner.

It’s fun and chock full of valuable info. However they are far too dismissive of the proven problems with hackable voting machines. As much as I respect and admire Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy Jr, I disagree with their stand on mail ballots. They point to a three isolated incidents of problems with mail ballots to discount mail voting as an option. They claim that according to official reports of the 2004 election, “526,426 absentee ballots were received but not counted”. While that’s definitely a HUGE problem, how many votes were disappeared from voting machines? We’ll never know because there are no statistics for hacked votes.

Mail voters MUST be conscientious. You must pay attention!

1 – Read and follow instructions

2 -Fill out your ballot properly

3 – SIGN YOUR BALLOT legibly in your registered name — as in not Bob for Robert

4 – Keep a copy of your voted ballot

5 – Deliver your ballot in person, be prepared to show ID

I prefer to put my “trust” in the hands of local elections officials. I used to be a local election judge in Minnesota. In 4 years, I never threw out a mailed ballot and I never saw a mailed ballot get thrown out. Moreover, I think the problem with local officials showing partisanship and tossing ballots points to the need for nationalizing elections and taking the oversight out of the hands of Secretaries of State and local officials. If corrupt SOS’s and local officials want to commit election fraud, they will tamper with any form of balloting, not only mail ballots.  

Call me crazy, but give me a piece of paper with a ballot number any day over unsecured hackable blips on a computer screen. I guess it all boils down to personal choice — a crap shoot. During my years as an election judge, I never could’ve imagined that voting would some day be like gambling.

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