Is a vote for McCain a vote for giving up our right to vote?

Republicans in office have consistently worked to block election reform that would require a paper trail for votes.

There are still many issues with e-voting and anomalies continue to show up. If there is no way perform an independent recount then those who control the machines control the election.

There was recently a Computerworld article, by Sharon Machlis, that pointed out some of the ongoing questions that have not been put to rest. In Let's Impeach E-voting she points out:

"Chris Hood told Rolling Stone magazine that he was working for Diebold in Georgia in 2002 when the head of the company's election division arrived to distribute a patch to workers. That code was applied to only about 5,000 machines in two counties. Hood says it was an unauthorized patch that was kept hidden from state officials."

"An attorney and IT security consultant last month cited that incident to renew challenges to 2004 Ohio elections, which had a similar mix of paperless Diebold machines and statistically curious results."

"In Alabama, questions linger about a supposed "glitch" that caused officials to change the winner of the governor's race six years ago; a research paper presented to the Alabama Political Science Association later described the new, changed results as statistically "anomalous" and outlined a possible scenario of vote-counting fraud."

I performed some statistical analysis on Florida election results after the 2004 Bush/Kerry elections which showed very strange anomalies. It appears that in many counties votes for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were switched. Here is a link to the stats: nusys.com/political (please note: a number of reference links are now broken.)

What do you think?

If other countries experienced the sort of discrepancies we've seen in this country, and exit polls and election results varied by such large margins, we'd point to those elections and called them obviously fixed. We are in danger of losing our democracy and we need to elect those who would protect it.

We must make sure we don't vote for politicians who say "all the right things" when the camera's rolling, but who contradict themselves when it comes to policy decisions. Let's wake up and educate our neighbors so we don't lose this country for good. We just might have a chance to reclaim our democracy.

What do you think about the state our election process?