$13 million! Purged voters

While the Republican Acorn hoax is distracting the country, millions of real people are being purged from the rolls.

From the Independent (UK):
Open House: The Vote Grab: Voter purge could swing result to McCain
From the Brennan Center for Justice: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008
From U.S. Politics Today: Making sure every vote ISN'T counted

Paper ballots--why not?

All over the civilized world, people vote on paper ballots, which are then individually hand counted. Why don't we?

My hero, Debra Bowen, California's secretary of state, recently commissioned some computer experts to try to hack the voting machines in use in California. Guess what? They were able to hack every single computer!

This is a threat to our democracy. And it wouldn't be that way if voting machine interests didn't have such a cozy relationship with elected officials.

If the Germans can hand-count votes, why can't we?

Let's say 150 million ballots are cast in an election. (I think it's quite a bit less than that, but we'll use that number.) Counting a thousand votes would be an easy task, so if 150,000 people volunteered--or were paid--to count votes, we could get it done in an evening. Say we paid each person $40. The total would be $6 million, a pittance compared to what it's cost so far to turn our elections over to the computers of for-profit corporations with their own private agendas.

Or if we don't want to pay the $6 million to insure democracy, why not shut down a couple of government offices, like the motor vehicle department or the county general services department, on the day after the election and have them count the vote--with citizen oversight, of course?

All the problems with malfunctioning machines, hanging chads, butterfly ballots and election officials with hidden agendas would simply disappear. We could even have optically scannable ballots, so we can compare the scan with the hand count and make sure there is no error or shenanigans in either system.

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