[MadIvan]

Why does it have to be this way? In Britain, Australia and Canada...all you do is get a piece of paper. You mark it with an X. You put it into the ballot box. That's it; no problems reported in the recent Aussie election.

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Ping!

[SpyGuy]

Why does it have to be this way?

Because if it were as simple as you suggest, it would be far more difficult for the Leftists in the DNC to steal elections through fraud and ballot manipulation.

Note that all these electronic voting machines were swept in on the tidal wave of Demoncrat "outrage" over President Bush's win in Florida 2000. First they created a phony scandal that Bush "stole" the election, using their own voter's stupidity as the evidence. Next the Demoncrats demanded that the old voting machines and methods be thrown out to prevent the "disenfranchisement" of a tiny minority of (their) voters. Now we have these electronic machines with no paper trail that can be completely corrupted with no evidence.

Of course, the icing on the cake is that the Propaganda Wing of the Demoncrat Party (the "mainstream" media) have already primed the public by claiming that the "evil Republicans" are behind these new electronic machines. That way the Demoncrats can have their cake and eat it too. If they succeed at manipulating the election results so that their candidate wins, no one will suspect that "Republican voting machines" would throw the election to the Demoncrats. And in any contested race where a Republican wins, they can immediately cry foul and claim that the Republicans committed fraud.

[NonValueAdded]

The sad thing is that punch cards are probably now completely understood. We know how to maintain the punch stations abd to be sure that they are cleaned out after each election, keeping the channels that received the punched out piece of chad clear. That said, optically scanned paper ballots are the way to go.