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To: elmatador who wrote (33623)	5/13/2003 9:03:41 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

elmat, Re: Electronic Voting in America You say: The manual system is kept to play with it like in African countries. Actually, I would have agreed with you a couple of years ago. Today, my thinking has gone through a dramatic 180 degree turn-around as I've investigated the methods of vote fraud in the U.S. Today, I've come to the conclusion that paper based systems are the best possible guarantee of a verifiable audit trail on voting results. I've learned how electronic systems are potentially rigged by partisans to produce the "right" vote results. One of the biggest red flags on this is a legal case that worked itself through the court system and was decided recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. They ruled that the software used to program electronic voting devices is "proprietary" to the private companies that develop voting machines. (These companies sell them for profit to the 1,000s of county clerks across the nation who are responsible for running our elections.) That is to say, the general public, or public advocacy groups have been precluded by the Supreme Court from gaining access to the voting machines to discover if fraud has occurred. In essence, the voting machines are "black boxes" which the public has been told to take entirely on faith in commercial operators. One such company is in part owned and controlled by a Republican Senator! To say that we should simply have faith in such a system, prone to partisan passions as it is, is naive at best and in my opinion, completely foolish. -Ray