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IPFS News Link • Voting - Election Integrity

Time to Mandate a Return to Paper Ballots Nationwide

• thiscantbehappening.net by Dave Lindorff

Politicians of both major parties love to boast that the US is the world's oldest democracy and of course a "model for the world." Putting aside the matter of whether or not that is even true (US "democracy" cannot really be said to have begun until women got the vote in 1920, and maybe until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made voting by blacks truly a reality in parts of the country, and meanwhile Iceland's Althing or parliament dates to 930 AD), the use of electronic voting machines in many jurisdictions has made any such claims a complete joke.

These needlessly confusing, often malfunctioning, and easily hackable devices, which have demonstrably done things like switch whole voting records from one candidate to another, or simply erased all votes cast in a day, and which are so costly that they are used as an excuse to provide only minimal opportunity to vote in many "undesirable" election districts, leading to lines that can require waiting hours outdoors just to get to cast a ballot, belie the claims made for the US to be a beacon of liberty and democratic governance.


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