Reply #102: You keep missing all the many points that I [View All]

and others raise, imenja.

I'll confine myself to addressing the points that you raise: the States' administration of the elections on their turf.

It is of absolutely paramount importance that they cease to have jurisdiction over elections, particularly federal. It is even enshrined in law: equal treatment.

Your suggestion that:

"The advantage of machine counts is that they can be more easily verified than hand counts", would be laughable were it not a tragic misrepresentation. Machine recounts make the same errors, deliberate or otherwise. The very fact of their being used
suggests, "deliberate".

In any case, as a side issue, it is always bad policy to reward criminals for their crimes. Their secretiveness concerning their machines in the current context is only susceptible to one interpretation.... However, that is a personal conviction; the objective realities are more than sufficient to stand on their own merits... irrespective of the probity or otherwise of the manufacturers.

"In a hand count system alone, errors and fraud can and will occur any and everywhere". No, not "everywhere".

"Every single ballot would have to be rechecked for accuracy. That might happen in a recount, but not during the normal course of elections".

Whatever intolerably dire labour-intensive burdens you impute to paper ballots, the fact remains they have been and continue to be used to the smoothest and most trouble-free effect in most advanced countries, whose government - most bitter of ironies, given your country's record in relation to elections, - frankly, is of far less significance to the world than that of the United States. The counts and recounts in national elections are performed in a matter of hours, and I have never heard any allegation of fraud, either here, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, to cite just a few countries.

And yet, believe it or not, their right to have their votes counted is - again, the most sovereign irony - held to be more precious by politically aware Americans than anywhere else in the world, save under overt and longstanding tyrranies.

Now, I'm off to look for Chuck Herrin's Power Point presentation on the Web.