Here's a very well written article on BBV (excerpt below). On another note, I had Christmas eve dinner last night with family and a couple who have been family friends forever (they are both in their 70's). Betty is very, very concerned about what will happen to our country if * wins next fall. Len is very concerned about the electronic voting. My brother's son said that he doesn't particularly like *, but if he's not happy with the dem candidate, he just won't vote. I said if he didn't vote, he would be giving * 1/2 a vote. This didn't phase him. If Democrats do nothing else in the next 3 months, we do need to find the candidate who has the best chance of beating Bush. This is admittedly very hard to do, but if we could do it, and that person turned out to be Lieberman, that's who I'd vote for. But of course, it is simply impossible to find the candidate who will do best next fall. You can poll 'till you're blue in the face. It is just unknowable. I am very concerned about the future of our country and our planet :(
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/vote-d24.shtmlUS voting machines: Will 2004 elections be electronically rigged?
By Alex Lefebvre
24 December 2003
Recent revelations about US voting machinery companies and their products raise serious questions about the integrity of the electoral process in the US, as well as in other countries. These companies, which have intimate ties to the US right wing, operate with no real outside supervision. According to information that has emerged, their products' safety designs are so poor that they offer many opportunities to rig elections, especially for well-connected insiders.
<snip>
Voters who cast their ballots using any of a number of electronic voting systems have no way to check that their votes have been properly recorded. A New York election commissioner, Douglas Kellner, said: "Using electronic voting machines to count ballots is akin to taking all the paper ballots and handing them over to a couple of computer tech people to count them in a secret room, and then tell us how it came out. This is not an acceptable way of conducting elections in a democracy."
The democratic qualifications of the pre-DRE voting in the US should not be overstated. There have been numerous cases of elections rigged via manipulation of other voting machinery systems, or by altogether different means. However, the scope of unverifiability and the centralized, secretive nature of the tallying process create the conditions for an unprecedented attack on the public's democratic right to have its vote counted.
<more>on edit: fixed some punctuation
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