What if we had an election without electronic voting machines?

[Stevepol]

14. I strongly agree with you.

The 2002 GA election (if it can be called that) was the thing that alerted me to the dangers of electronic vote counting. I'll never forget watching Sonny Perdue, the new Repub governor after he defeated the incumbent Dem Barnes (who had an 11% lead on Perdue according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll conducted before the election) by 5%. He looked stunned. He hardly knew what he was doing. It was obvious he never thought he would be in that situation.

In that election, the entire vote was counted completely in cyber space, no paper, no human eye saw any actual paper vote, no hand touched any paper. It was entirely "faith-based vote counting" on Diebold touch-screens. The programming for the machine was in all likelihood at least partly devised by a man who was convicted of embezzlement of a bank by using a sophisticated scheme that involved the malicious programming of computers. As soon as he was out of prison he began working for Global Election Systems, a company that was doing programs for elections. They were bought up by Diebold in 2002 and that summer the programs for the Diebold vote counting in GA were devised.

Max Cleland lost with a similar unbelievable vote flip. He was the one I was really pulling for because I thought he could help put a brake on Bush's rush to war in Iraq. I liked him a lot. He was also and still is a highly intelligent and capable Democrat. I've heard that he now thinks his election was stolen with the aid of the voting machines.