Stealing the vote? we haz that

There is a lot of stuff on Drudge about electronic voting machines being hacked.

Duh. Nothing new about that: I remember in the 1950's when the machines that were essentially mechanical counting machines could be hacked by placing an object inside so the machine wouldn't click all the way over.

And of course, the phrase "stuffing the ballot box" has a long and noble history.

Ironically, we here in the Philippines have recently switched to some form of electronic voting machines in order to make the elections more honest. Hello Garci, anyone?

The trick to cheat using paper ballots is to prevote for folks, and then when you bring the boxes to be counted (here it is done by teachers) you substitute the ones you had prepared and let the real voter boxes in the closet.

Which is why I laugh at the clueless Americans who think paper ballots are the way to go.

No the votes are only as honest as the people who count the votes.

But I agree that maybe having two ballots, with the papers as backup, might be the way to go....

But nowadays even I have trouble with the ballots, so expect a lot of folks to get confused and vote wrong.

as for ID: yes, of course.

Driver's license same day voting is fine, but I remember when Lolo hadn't registered (I was a doc, and this was after he stopped driving and this was Minnesota, where they had same day voting) so he came with me to the voting booth and voted with his passport and some bills showing where we lived. Everyone laughed, because I was known, and he was known because there were only two Asians in town, and people saw him jogging every morning past the school.

This was the election that Jesse Ventura won, because all the usual stay at home voters who didn't register just went and registered to vote for him. I laughed when he won, but you know, he wasn't a bad governor. He had the nerve to send the surplus back to the citizens, when all the big shots in Minneapolis wanted to use it to build a fancy new stadium. He pointed out that most of the state wouldn't benefit from this, so advised locals to raise their own money, so I got a check in the mail.

He might be a bit nuts now, but hey, thanks for the cash, Jesse..