"Mark you, it is in no way difficult OR expensive (compared to the initial cost of the systems, most of which are taxpayer ripoffs to start) to provide these safeguards, and anyone saying otherwise is either A) utterly ignorant, B) a liar, C) a corrupt politician or hanger-on, or D) all of the above."
As a guy who designs this kinds of electronics, I could not agree with you more.
No big deal at all to provide an audit trail.
We do it all the time in banking and other industries, where there is no illusion at all about the possible failure of these electronics.
They DO fail and they CAN be tampered with.
This is a little bit frightening to me. The more I learn about this, the more I like the idea of paper ballots.
Anyone who can't properly use a paper ballot is too stupid to be voting anyway.
On this issue...Democrats and Republicans can agree.
Paper...not vapor.
Exactimundo. I do the same thing you do, except on the software side. As the famous Roman consul and lawyer Cicero once did, we have to ask ourselves a question about audit-trailless systems:
Cui bono? Who benefits? I bet you and I know the answers to THAT one straightaway, eh?
A voting system simply MUST have paper, and preferably a receipt printed for the voter, too. Even as corrupt as St. Louis is, election-wise, the corruption is in the people, esp. the North Side hacks. The voting SYSTEM itself (which uses, guess what, butterfly ballots...and has for at least 3 decades) has no problems at all. I and my old sidekick, Bernie Gerwel, used to zip on down to the Election Board HQ a week or so before every election and RECERTIFY the software (and when have you heard about, say, Diebold doing **that**, hmm?), using a collection of 8 sample sets of 12K ballots each. Took about 3 hours the first time, and we gradually got it down to less than an hour by 1993. One time, it went so quickly -- completely glitch-free, that we didn't even bill the Board, just had 'em take us out to lunch (g!).