Why I’m Still Worried

I was doing some searching on the internet to see if NY voters out here on Long Island are still going to cast their vote on the ancient level machines (fine by me).

Turns out most of us will, although the Federal Government is giving us a hard time about it.

Despite the fact that many states are moving away from error-prone, insecure electronic voting machines in favor of plain old-fashioned paper ballots, there are still 34 states using them.

This August The Washington Post reported that the Premier (formerly “Diebold”) system contained “a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point.” This problem has been part of the software for the last 10 years! The system is used in 34 states. The flaw exists in both Premier’s touch screens and optical scanners. But problems like these are endemic to all other brands of these systems as well.

Got that? 34 states are still using these machines.

Oprah said when she took advantage of the early voting in Chicago and cast her vote, when she got to the review screen, the machine hadn’t registered her vote for president.

This is why Democrats will have to win this election in overwhelming numbers — to overcome the margin of fraud error, something they were unable to do in 2000 and 2004.

So if you can vote today, do it. Bring a fold up chair to the polls if you think you’re going to be waiting a while. Don’t leave without voting and making sure your vote is registered. Make sure everyone you know plans to vote. We can’t spare one vote this year.

This Tuesday we’re likely to see record election turnout. I’m worried, but hopeful.