Computerized Election Theft

[Grizzly]

^^^
Yep.

[dada]

I guess I'm not seeing how making Donald the new face of a movement for democratic integrity would help in dismantling the black box voting system in any way. It's nothing personal, just a question of tactics.

Donald supports counting votes by hand, good for him. Even a stopped watch is always right twice a day. And a melting watch wasn't even always.

[Marionumber1]

It is probably by design that Trump is embracing this "radical" and largely verboten position on US vote counting, especially since, as per usual, he surrounded it with plenty of bullshit that will likely cause most of his opponents to throw out the entire message. That is likely one of Trump's many functions to the deep state and part of why he was installed in 2016...as his campaign and GOP operatives fought to stop hand counts that would have revealed this fact. Recall how many people on the left demonized Trump for disputing Bill O'Reilly's tirade about Putin being a killer by retorting "You think our country's so innocent?"; the same people who used to make similar arguments themselves were now pushed into defending the American system as fundamentally honest. Or how the idea of a "deep state" has been converted into a fundamentally partisan concept, with liberals starting to wholeheartedly embrace the military/intelligence community they had once criticized. Trump is allowed to occasionally speak the truth because his very doing so discredits that truth.

There have already been so many baseless objections to hand-counted paper ballots that the intelligentsia trot out whenever the voices advocating it get loud enough. The last thing that movement needs is Trump's "endorsement".

[conniption]

A blast from the past...

ratville

The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
(embedded links)

by Larry Chin
5 Nov 2004
Online Journal

It Is a Rigged Game
How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
The Triumph of the Bush Machines
Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry.
Wait, Were All Already Here.

Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.

But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened" let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.

Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.

It Is a Rigged Game

The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, and cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.

As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a créme brulee."

Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".

Criminals do not "permit" elections.

It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture."

How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency

How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.

Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)

In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.

"The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called `amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient `glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly `glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the `trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."

In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.

The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.

Then what?

Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And Secret GOP Plan to Disrupt Voting in Florida.)

Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.

The Triumph of the Bush Machines

But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.

Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included -LC]:

"This is how it appears: Bush got more votes as a real number and as a percentage of the entire vote than did Clinton. Bush got more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history. Bush's party gained four Senate seats which puts them five away from being filibuster-proof. Bush's party gained in the United States House of Representatives. The largest number of voters since 1968 turned out to vote in this presidential election -- 60% of us. Bush won with 51% of 60% is 31%. 31% of eligible voters have determined that the United States is to go fascist. . . .

"The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, and Sequoia. There's a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies, all four of them, are hard-wired into the Bush power structure and they have been given God knows how many millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. Now in the areas where voting machines weren't used, superfluous point. It doesn't matter. . . .

"The technology involved from these four companies had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. . . . Georgia, where I live, had Diebold machines in every single precinct. It was a test. And as a result of the test a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called [an] `amazing' . . . 16 percent swing. This was when Voter News Service was eliminated. Exit polls showed both Max Cleland (the Senator) and Roy Barnes (the Governor) leading by substantial, double-digit leads. And they were both turned out.

"Now who's behind these private companies? It's a little difficult to tell. The corporate lines of these so-called competitors are intricately mixed. . . . Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by somebody named Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at `rival' ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote count business by someone named Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. . . . Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy. . . .

"[The four companies are interconnected; they are not four `competitors'.] Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes. Needless to say his own victory was recorded as `an amazing upset'. Chuck Hagel still has a million dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S.

"Sequoia . . . is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, called Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. [Also see Meet The Carlyle Group.] Do you see how this works? That's where Bush I makes millions trawling the world for war pork, for privatization, sweetheart deals, government theft, thievery, drug deals. . . .

"Meanwhile, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) is referred to as a `shadowy defense contractor'. They have gotten into the vote counting game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including a guy named Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci, and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security `lapses' in its electronic systems hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless pose little obstacle in its entrance into the vote counting business. . . .

"The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, which was signed by Bush a couple of years ago. The chief lobbying group pushing for the Act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, `That sounds like a good idea! Help America Vote') to be passed was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

"There you have it. So when you hear people -- I don't care if they're liberal, conservative, middle-of-the-roaders -- when you hear people saying, `Take a deep breath, . . . we need to work harder, we need to organize . . . we will pull through this' -- No. We will not. Unless this cancer is cut out. Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and SAIC. . . . I don't care who tells you, `Keep a stiff upper lip. We'll pull through it.' No. We shall not. It's over. Unless these companies are gotten out of the vote counting business. [See "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" by Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin, Dan S. Wallach, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May, 2004]

"[As far as] the story on Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and SAIC, you can do your own google research on this, find out about this guy named Ahmanson, you can find out why so much emphasis this time was placed on Christ, how much fear was placed about those damned queers getting married, or that stem cell research, or all these so-called moral issues. . . . All of that stuff has to do with the white men involved with running these four vote tabulation companies. . . .

"Until electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours. . . .

"The only way the Democrats are going to win it next time or any time is by going back to paper ballots. . . . Anything other than that and it's over. . . . [Listening today to the pundits hold forth on the results of this election] and the very essential fact is completely left out of the discussion. And that [story] is the four, and soon to be five, companies wired in to the Bush Crime Family and wired in to the Christian Reconstruction movement that now control the voting machine industry.

"The people connected to the Christian Reconstruction movement are the ones who wrote the software. . . . Let's not be stupid, America. There is a terrible thing going on right now. These [are] sick, religious fundamentalists, and I'm not talking about your local Southern Baptists. As far as I know the local southern baptist doesn't want to kill queers. The Christian Reconstruction movement does. And that's just the opening salvo: the queers, the jews, the catholics, the muslims. And women in this movement are chattle. . . . [See Christian Reconstructionism, Dominion Theology, and Theonomy: "Practices: If they gained control of the US or Canadian federal government, there would be many changes: The use of the death penalty would be greatly expanded, when the Hebrew Scriptures' laws are reapplied. People will be executed for adultery, blasphemy, heresy, homosexual behavior, idolatry, prostitution, evil sorcery (some translations say Witchcraft), etc. The Bible requires those found guilty of these `crimes' to be either stoned to death or burned alive. Reconstructionists are divided on the execution method to be used. . . . It would be logical to assume that the institution of slavery would be reintroduced, and regulated according to Biblical laws. Fathers could sell their daughters into slavery. Female slaves would retain that status for life. People who owned slaves would be allowed to physically abuse them, as long as they did not beat them so severely that they died within three days."]

"We'll never know what the vote really was. The tabulation gave 51% to monkey-boy and 49.7% to Senator Kerry. But you and I will never know. No one will ever know. Except maybe the people within the Christian Reconstructionist movement who sold the software, or provided the software, to these four companies. They may know.

"All I'm asking for is at least some honesty. . . . It all comes down to who counts the votes. . . . There will never again be a legitimate election in this country until these companies are driven out of business. . . .

"Coming along with Bush is a gallery of grotesqueries in the Senate. More than one of the new senators advocate capital punishment for abortion; another urging that all gay teachers be fired . . . The new majority in the Senate . . . is not Republican, it's theocratic . . . And there are [practically] no checks and balances left. . . . The United States Senate [now has] 55 Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen [in the 2006] mid-term elections -- trust me -- Please don't sit there tonight listening to this program saying to yourself, `No, We'll turn it around in 2006.' NO WE WON'T. Unless there are paper ballots, they're verifiable, and anybody can take a look at them. That's the only way. If we use the voting machines -- and by 2006 . . . tens of millions of people will be using the touch-screen voting machine -- it's over then. . . . There are no checks and balances except [that] the U.S. Senate is still 55-45. Once the Senate becomes 60-40 that's it. Because with 60 senators you can vote for cloture and shut off filibuster. That means that no matter what Bush and the crime family wants to do, they can do it. Forget about the House (of Representatives). The House is gone for the next two or three or four or five generations. I'm talking 40-50 years. . . It's gone. . . .

"The last thing that rational people in this country need right now . . . is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. . . . Nothing is going to happen except it's going to get worse until electronic voting is eliminated. That's the key. . . . There will never again be a legitimate election in this country. Until we get rid of the machines.

"The people who put the software together -- do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? . . . [Then] you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash. . . .

"Kerry did not lose the election. . . . The election was stolen. Please get that through your head. . . .

"The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.

"There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over `what went wrong,' second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how `next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!', and that `we'll nominate even better candidates!'

"Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?

"When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result."

Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms

John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio -- Diebold's home state -- was sickening.

Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."

Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.

Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?

Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?

In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?

How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?

To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.

As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunit." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.

Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes:

"If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."

Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg's books, The Party's Over - Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003), and Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World; A visionary response to the coming energy famine (2004)) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.

Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.

Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees -- potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot -- have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)

In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: `Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them.'"

Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."

Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.

What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.

We cannot be fooled.


Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.

Copyright © 2004 Larry Chin
Copyright © 2004 Online Journal
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.

https://ratical.org/ratville/2004chin.html

[dada]

Have you noticed how "counting up the votes" has become outdated, obsolete. Yet we're still stuck in the mud. Voting results can be immediate, as instantaneous as hitting like on social media.

It isn't electronic voting, but old ways of thinking that is the problem.

[Marionumber1]

Have you noticed how "counting up the votes" has become outdated, obsolete. Yet we're still stuck in the mud. Voting results can be immediate, as instantaneous as hitting like on social media.

It isn't electronic voting, but old ways of thinking that is the problem.

I have to disagree with that quite strongly: electronic voting certainly is a big problem, and instantaneous results at the expense of credible results is not a trade worth making. There's pretty compelling evidence that the results of the 2000 presidential election, 2002 midterm elections, 2004 presidential election, and 2016 presidential election (among many others) all had their outcomes reversed through e-voting machine fraud.

[dada]

Sure, I'm envisioning a voting system that gives both instantaneous and credible results. Not saying that it would be an easy undertaking to create a secure infrastructure, for so many reasons. But could it be done? Possibly. Will it? Probably not any time soon.

Still, to my thinking, the technology will be employed one way or another. If we don't find a way to use it to our advantage, it will certainly be used to the advantage of the corporate body.

[dada]

People make financial transactions electronically every minute, every second. No system is perfectly secure, of course. But the general public, banks, credit card companies, amazon and the rest of the Internet do it all the time. We trust the transactions to be credible, and they are credible enough that the system continues to function fairly smoothly.

[Marionumber1]

A key difference is that these financial transactions are not anonymous: they are tied to our identity and auditable from start to finish throughout their communication chain. Voting is anonymous to prevent intimidation and vote buying, with everyone's own vote just going into a pile of numbers that is tallied up, and from which you cannot go backwards to the individual voters. The goals of anonymity and verifiability are at odds when using an electronic system. In general, you will find pretty much nobody in the field of cybersecurity supporting any kind of Internet voting system, for this reason and many others.

[dada]

How much are anonymity and verifiability really at odds, though? A Swiss Bank account is virtually anonymous.

Electronic financial systems depend on a certain level of privacy just to function. Layers of privacy can be added, like in the case of the Swiss. The highest privacy would be anonymity. No system is perfect, at least not yet.

But a paper ballot system is not perfect either. Witness the history of democracy. And there are alot of moving parts between the ballot box and the AP newswire, for error to set in.

[Marionumber1]

A Swiss bank account under one's control might be anonymous to observers but not to the account holder. The point of voting as a fully anonymous process is that no one, including yourself, can prove the contents of your individual vote; thus (when combined with the secret ballot) removing the prospect of being intimidated into voting a certain way or buying/selling votes. And this is fine because, after all, it doesn't really matter what any individual person's vote was, just the overall count. If one made the argument that this guarantee about voter anonymity is no longer relevant in the modern era, then it would perhaps be possible to do an in-principle secure electronic voting system, though there are still other concerns like malware on the systems used to vote and (if we go all the way to Internet voting) the lack of paper audit trail.

Any voting system has the potential for problems, but hand-counted paper ballots are still considered the gold standard. There is a reason that is our go-to counting method when an election is seriously in dispute. Especially in this era with widespread video recording and streaming capability, it is much easier to enact measures ensuring that hand counts are always observed. Paper ballot frauds are effectively prevented through the counting process itself rather than, as with electronic voting systems, relying on some vague hope that an audit (which can be and have been subverted in various ways) will catch it later. And unlike with electronic voting systems, paper ballots do not make it nearly as feasible to commit the kind of systemic nationwide election fraud that we have seen in the past two decades. The kind of fraud with paper ballots that we see nowadays tends to be more about local pockets of corruption scrambling desperately to protect election outcomes already preordained by fraudulent machines because someone had the cojones to request a recount or audit.

[dada]

The paper ballot is simply a low-tech transmisson of an encrypted signal. We know how many voted, and how many voted for what, but we can't track back to who voted for what.

A secure electronic system should be able to encrypt the signal. The voter votes, the vote is encrypted. We know how many voted, and how many voted for what, but the encryption ensures that we can't track back to who voted for what.

Paper ballots may work for a representative democracy, but they also serve as a hinderance to direct democracy. I think it should be considered if we're looking at the process of democracy from every angle, taking everything into account. Then the question isn't so much how to maintain the democratic institutions that keep failing us, but how to make them work better for us.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The paper ballot is simply a low-tech transmisson of an encrypted signal. We know how many voted, and how many voted for what, but we can't track back to who voted for what.

A secure electronic system should be able to encrypt the signal. The voter votes, the vote is encrypted. We know how many voted, and how many voted for what, but the encryption ensures that we can't track back to who voted for what.

Paper ballots may work for a representative democracy, but they also serve as a hinderance to direct democracy. I think it should be considered if we're looking at the process of democracy from every angle, taking everything into account. Then the question isn't so much how to maintain the democratic institutions that keep failing us, but how to make them work better for us.

A paper ballot is more than just an encrypted signal, its a physical thing too. It is an artifact that has mass. As a result it can be observed and there can be a chain of control or responsibility for it than can be monitored. The only way to falsify a paper ballot is to physically replace it (and you'd have to destroy it in the process.) Often this creates witnesses.

It could work with direct democracy I agree. But at that point we'd probably need to remove anonimity from the process.

[dada]

So after voting, the paper ballot becomes the proof that a vote was cast. The physical object could be a proof of receipt, printed out in a secure facility at the moment the encrypted signal is received. The entire process could still be monitored. On the user end, there's no proof of voting even with a paper ballot, other than a sticker that says 'I voted.'

But the larger point I'm making is that to make a fair assessment of the democratic process as a whole means considering how the structure of the ritual effects the outcomes. I think that there are cons as well as pros to be weighed in the balance, where the 'snail mail' systems currently in place are concerned.

[Harvey]