Bob & Harvey's 3-Step "Ohio Plan" for Fair and Reliable Voting and Vote Counts

by Harvey Wasserman | January 16, 2008

2. UNIVERSAL HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS:

It is by now a public article of faith that electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. A recent $1.9 million study for the Ohio Secretary of State has confirmed that an electronic voting machine can be flipped with a magnet and a Blackberry. After reports by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, Princeton University, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee and many more, even the come-lately New York Times has now deemed touch-screen machines to be eminently hackable.

The country owes a huge debt of gratitude to the grassroots uprising of independent researchers and bloggers that has campaigned so bravely and effectively in the face of a mainstream media intent on ignoring the issue.

Now the Times and others seem to want a "middle ground" with Optiscan machines that run paper ballots through a reader, and even worse, feed them into computerized central tabulators.

We oppose this hackable non-solution. At least two Optiscan scams come quickly to mind. In Toledo, Ohio, inner city wards, Optiscan ballots were improperly calibrated causing a higher rate than normal to be rejected by the reader. Scores of them remain uncounted from the 2004 Ohio presidential election. In fact, most of the 93,000 or so uncounted ballots in Ohio fell under the label “machine rejected.”

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12181