Can You Trust Your Vote To Count?

Levy: Will Your Vote Count In 2006?

The news is beginning to get into the mainstream press: Your Vote May Not Count.

I've always found paper more trustworthy than computers with my vote. You know what you vote, you can see clearly where your vote's been tampered with (at least before you cast it) and there a clear trail. Chads aside, it takes effort to fix the vote on paper.

On a computer screen, however, one can easily do things to fix the vote. The most subtle would be to shift the vote for each precinct by a specified number of votes (3 votes X 10,000 voting places = 30,000 votes shifted); one can also change the count, work by percentages, mysteriously disappear the votes, or a mix of these depending on precinct and what you want shown.

As it happned, every shift shown by these machines in 2004 seemed to magically go the way of the Republicans. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find some of the shifts in other races: I saw some really odd voting shifts in some precincts in the 3rd ward in Chicago back in 2003.