Or, 'Still Whistling Past Democracy's Graveyard'...

Brad Friedman Byon 7/12/2012, 3:55pm PT

In case you're wondering, it's not just The BRAD BLOG trying to warn folks on the Right, Left and everywhere in between of the pending disasters of our oft-failed, almost always wholly-unverified and quickly disappearing system of once-overseeable, theoretically-democratic system of electoral self-governance.

As Steven Rosenfeld, veteran journalist of the 2004 Ohio mess, writes this week at Alternet in "Not Again! How Our Voting System Is Ripe For Theft and Meltdown in 2012" [emphasis added]:

"We need good technology and we need good laws," said Barbara Simons. The retired IBM computer scientist and nationally known expert on voting technology is co-author of a new book, Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? which details America's history of voting machinery and election administration, and concludes that many states have neither good technology nor good vote count rules. "We are running elections in this country as if we are still in the 19th century," she said. "The results are announced and there is no verification. At minimum, we should be doing manual post-election ballot audits for all major elections whether or not the results are close, because there even could be a major problem with an election with a wide margin."

Rosenfeld covers a lot of ground in his piece, so you should read it in full.

That said, as much ground as he covers, he and the experts he quotes still manage to understate the concerns, while failing to define what, in nearly a decade on this beat we have found, so far, to be the only apparent solution: Hand-marked paper ballots counted publicly, by hand, on Election Night, at the precinct, in front of all parties, observers and video cameras, with decentralized results posted at those precincts, before ballots are allowed to move anywhere.

You have been warned. Again.

Now back to your bickering about off-shore bank accounts and "socialism", or whatever it is you feel your time is better spent on between now and November 6.

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