More Re- Election Fraud

Here's a tip. Many states offer the option of "straight-party voting"; that is, instead of having to actually vote re- each office on the ballot, you can just check one box or whatever for a particular party to indicate that you want to vote for all the candidates of that party.

Please do NOT do that. Please go through and vote for an individual candidate for each office on the ballot. Investigation has shown that the electronic voting machines seem to be particularly error-prone when you vote straight-party. Blackboxvoting.org has stated, "[v]oting machine miscounts of straight party votes were proven by California researcher Judy Alter in the 2004 New Mexico presidential election; in Alabama Democrat straight party votes were caught going to a Republican; and [in] Wisconsin a whole slew of straight party votes disappeared altogether. Both DRE and optical scan machines are vulnerable." (Note, blackboxvoting.org is not my preferred source of info on this subject, but the general idea is consistent with other sources.)

Also, obviously, we NEED a landslide in order to overcome the cheating; but even if it becomes plain that we'll have a landslide in Obama's favor, cheating will still occur for TWO reasons:

1. Even if the presidential election can't plausibly be stolen, thousands of Congressional and other offices can be.

2. There is value in rigging elections to appear closer than they really were, because it sets precedents for interpreting the reliability of results in subsequent elections. E.g., if a Dem wins a certain office in a certain county by 2 points when the exit polls predicted 6, and in a subsequent election, the exit polls predict a Dem win by only 3 points, a Repub win by 1 point seems more plausible based on the previously-established historical discrepancy. Note that this since electronic cheating is believed to have been going on since the 2000 elections, we probably already have several cycles of distortion -- much of the country may be a lot blue-er than we realize.

Election reform must be a top priority of the next administration. We must have paper ballots, and the tabulation must be an entirely open process supervised by representatives from all parties and subject to complete audit.

UPDATE: Snopes has confirmed the risks of straight-party voting; see also VotersUnite ("Misprogramming has often caused voting equipment to tabulate straight-party votes incorrectly. . . . in prior elections, misprogramming caused straight-party votes to be dropped or counted for the opposite candidate, for example, in Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. . . . Straight-party vote-flipping has already occurred in this [2008] election on two different e-voting machines in Texas -- the ES&S iVotronic in Dallas and the Hart InterCivic eSlate in Houston.") Also see another, excellent new RFK article via Rolling Stone (Thanks, Craig!)