ACORN

[eppie]

No question about it. I have a friend who is an engineer and a computer programmer. He worked in Texas for a few years and was there for the '04 elections. The same thing happened to him and to his wife. His choices were changed and he had to get an 'official' to help. Now think. If these machines were rigged, then they were rigged by someone not too competent. Someone who had a clue would rig it so that the screen showed the voter's selections, but the tally would go to the person in who's favor the machine was rigged. And done that way, no one would be the wiser short of a statistical analysis. Even if such an analysis were done, there would be no independent evidence and no way to correct the results.

--Pete

I don´t think this is the biggest problem if everybody can just register himself several times. As I said before, if this is so easy, now way ACORN would be the only ones doing it.

In Holland almost all voting stations used computers until the populists started saying that you can fiddle with them and thus they were not 'safe'.
You are right do about the fraud thing...it is not much of a fraud if everybody can see what happens.
I actually think it should be not a big problem to use computer.
Have them prepared and checked at a well maintained impartial site. Send all the computers ´blind´ to the places they are used. Connect them to a second computer, combine the numbers people are given when entering a voting station with those in the computer...encrypt all of this so that you can't quickly see who voted what etc. etc. Many voting station have less then a 1000 people using it (is that right) so rigging all of them would be a lot of trouble to go through.
I think the probability and the cause of rigging voting machine can be minimized to acceptable levels (almost 0) without too many problems. (think about testing them before voting starts etc.)