Well here's my reaction to some very revealing and interesting video where
Texas state legislators of both parties double, triple and quadruple voting. Voting more than once is against the rules of the Texas legislature prohibiting more than one vote, yet you see they even cross party lines to vote on machines for legislators of the opposing party on more than one occasion. (See the video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG6X-xtVask&eurl =
Just askin':
I'm just wondering if lawmakers will openly break the rules of the legislature on camera and/or in open session to vote more than once, what might we expect if we UP THE ANTE JUST A BIT:
(1) it's a real election involving the continued income and power of the official personally, and
(2) many issues of high importance to all voters hang in the balance, including those of importance to the legislator, and (most important of all)
(3) instead of the voting abuse taking place in open legislative session with possible videotaping, instead the vote recording and vote counting is done on invisible, computerized secret vote counting machines, such as touch screens or optical scan voting machines?
With the addition of much higher stakes and the protection of invisible secret counts would these legislators in this video contact their election official insider friends and arrange a visit or some help???
Add to all of that the fact that the secrecy of the counts are subsequently protected by most courts from evidentiary production under specious "commercial trade secrecy" claims to vote "more than once" when it definitely can't be caught on video tape like this?
Thanks to BradBlog
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5119 and BlackBoxvoting for blasting out this video link (not sure who got there first)
THis leads to the ONLY ultimate solution in elections: CITIZEN-CONTROLLED ELECTIONS, whereby we know for sure that even if the incumbents are crooks, we can boot 'em out. Election officials get their paychecks and power from the elections and have too many conflicts of interest to do the job alone. ONly with citizen-CONTROL (not just "oversight", not just "supervision") can we be assured that we are, yes, a "FREE PEOPLE" because a free people can kick out incumbents AT WILL.
And that citizen control is definitely NOT PRESENT when it comes to electronic voting of either Optical Scan (paper ballot) or touch screen DRE types.
PS I'm an election attorney and the reason optical scan "paper ballots" don't work even though they "can be recounted" is that recounts actually happen a tiny fraction of 1% of all ballots, and when the election is really suspicious-looking they commonly find ways to stop the recounts (think Bush v Gore, think raising the price of the recount to the sky, and innumerable other tactics).