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The new electronic machines will bring pluses and a few minuses to the system. My main concern is a lack of paper trail, BUT I must say that of all the electronic options, the one they chose came closest to placating this concern of mine by far.

The machines are extremely secure and leave little possibility of problems from the lack of a paper trail, simply because each record is duplicated. Each of the individual machines records the vote internally, while also sending it into a second memory storage in a central unit. It also records the time, so votes cast after the election is supposed to be closed will be flagged. The machine must be literally opened up inside through tamper resistant seals to get to the memory card, so any fraud will be detected that way.

The touch screen thing is often thought of as a convenience, but trust me - the wheel is better ballot security wise. Touch screens on computers must be calibrated, and a single calibration error (intentional or not) could end up casting votes for the wrong person, whereas the wheel will always turn to whoever is being selected.

I was a pollwatcher yesterday, volunteering for the Sanchez Campaign. We had only 40+ volunteers for pollwatching. We needed a lot more, and two at some polling locations would have been preferable. I have been told by other pollwatchers that they have many incident reports which will be turned in on Monday to the Sanchez legal people.

I was at a poll at an elementary school from 6:20AM till the Pct. Judge left at 9:03PM. There was no fraud at this precinct (visible to me). The judge followed the law. I have no idea what he would have done had there been no pollwatcher present. He seemed like an honest man but he is an experienced demorat operative. He spent all day, (mostly on the telephone to Co. Clerk's office), assisting voters who were in the wrong precinct, were not on the poll list, had many name discrepancies or thought/said that they had/were registered to vote. He made every effort possible to get them to cast their vote as he was helping the speech challenged mayor's re-election effort and he knew damn well who these folks were going to vote for.

This is a 99% black precinct. I saw 6 non-black people all day. A pollwatcher from the Secretary of State's office also came by for about 2 hours. Approx. 60 people were turned away, (2 were felons). another 20+ were directed to the correct precinct. Some of these people thought that they could vote at any polling place, (or perhaps, they were trying to vote again). IMHO there are many inaccuracies in the records of registered voters. One man pointed out that his grandmother, deceased in 1982 was still on the poll list. He also said that someone had signed her in as voted in 11/2000 when he came to vote and saw her name. I know that Paul Bettencourt has been trying to clean up the reg. voter rolls but the demorats have not been helpfull and have taken cheating to very sofisticated levels. The motor-voter and other lax voter registration processes invite dishonesty and cheating, and the demorats have taken full advantage of this.

I kept a count of the ballots and it concurred with the Pct. Judge's 364 ballots. 62 people voted early. Only one tried to vote again. She stated that she did not vote early but was rejected. This precinct got 50+% turnout.

We lost by 4383 votes and 313,632 people voted to determine our mayor. This turnout was 31.53%. Where the hell are the others? The blacks (25% of Houston) the stupid whites who voted for Doofuss, and the hispanics who do not register/vote have chosen our mayor.

Now Doofuss brown will further the agenda of his puppet masters and run us further into debt. "but we wont raise your taxes & fees". But... we will have our toy train, all the ballparks for the wealthy team owners and a downtown convention hotel which no hotel chains would invest in!

Time to move out of this city/county before the interset payments on the new 1.3B of bonds start to come due.

Anyone want to buy my house in the museum district? I'm out of here!