"Fifty ways to steal an election."
The beauty of democracy is in it's simplicity. All that is needed to carry out an election, whether it's in a Zimbabwean mud hut or in the centre of a bustling city like New York are pencils, papers carrying the choice of candidates, a box to hold the papers once marked, and people to country the votes and recount them if there is any dispute about the result.
Whenever I hear of paperless voting machines my hackles rise, because there is simply no reason to make the process so complicated and no way to verify whether or not the result that we are being given is a true one.
And, if there are ways in which the process can be corrupted, then you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will work out a way to do so. After all paper and pencils are cheaper and more reliable and they are not spending all that money for nothing.
In this video Stephen Spoonamore claims that the 2004 election was likely rigged to suit Bush.
Now, I have no idea whether his claims are true or false, but it strikes me as obvious that the very fact that this claim could be made undermines faith in democracy simply due to the use of these machines. They should simply be banned. And I simply couldn't have faith in any system which uses such an obviously hackable method to count what the electorate actually wants.
You can watch all of his interview through a series of videos to be found here.
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