SNIP...Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole 2004 and Will Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), said the country will not have accurate vote counts unless it returns to a system of hand-counted paper ballots.
"I am not impressed," he said. "The best that one can say about optical scanners is that they are prone to frequent breakdowns. In the 2006 election, they malfunctioned from coast to coast. In 13 counties in Kentucky, optical scanners failed to come through for various reasons. There were problems reported in Colorado and California and Maine. Optical scanners are delicate machines that break down, miscount and malfunction."
SNIP..."It is all very well for the bill to stipulate there will be an audit protocol," Miller said. "Even if that audit protocol were iron-clad, the fact is audits are belated. They occur after Election Night. Unless this bill outlaws the (television) networks' practice of calling the winner on Election Night, the audits won't make a dime's worth of difference because any ex post facto revelations will strike most people as the desperate measures of sore losers ..."
"The alternative is hand-counted paper ballots," Miller said. "Only in Washington does that notion get dismissed as utopia."
SNIP..."If this were a perfect world, the new bill would be OK," Miller said, after hearing Holt's comment. "But the real world has been perpetrated by election fraud. I don't think the perpetrators of fraud have anything to fear from this bill."
http://www.alternet.org/election08/71608/?page=1
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