Just because you cast a vote doesn’t mean it will be counted. After all, we know what happened in Florida and Ohio in 2000 and 2004. NJ Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a bill to help voting districts that want to either go with paper ballots or auditable machines for the 2008 election to fund the switchover in time. (AP):

The bill, dubbed the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, seeks to fix what many critics fear is a potential problem with paperless electronic voting machines — a lack of voter-verified paper records.

The bill would provide incentives for states to provide verified, audited balloting for the general election, but would not mandate standards for all states.

Video via The BradBlog.

Voters in all or parts of 20 states, including New Jersey, now cast ballots electronically without backup paper verification, said New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, who has sponsored the bill in the House.

“Millions of Americans will be voting on unreliable electronic machines without paper ballots. There will be questions that cannot be resolved because there is no way of determining a voter’s intention. All you have is an electronic memory,” said Holt, a Democrat.

Holt said he crafted the emergency bill because the House has not approved his earlier measure that mandated the use of backup paper ballots and audits in time for the presidential election.

More below the fold.

Do you have electronic voting without a paper trail? If you do, look at the simple steps used to hack the Diebold box.

The freaking removable memory cards in these machines, which should only contain voter data, has an executable program on it that can change totals to whatever someone wishes it register in advance of a vote. It’s as easy as editing a spreadsheet, people. This means the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the voter eventually selects on either an e-machine, or worse, even an optical scan machine where you actually have a marked up paper-trail ballot. Even on the latter Diebold machines, the vote is verified by officials by the poll tape that is printed out and compared to the software that tabulates the totals. If they match, then that machine’s results are considered verified. If the result is preordained on the memory card, it doesn’t matter what a voter filled in on their ballot.

Who’s going to know that they need to reconcile that printed tape to all of those ballots to find the discrepancy?

Hacker Harri Hersti was engaged by Black Box Voting to prove this hack (his report here), and an example of the fraud is all filmed.

In Florida, Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho presided over a trial “mini-election” to see if the vote could be hacked without being detected. Before votes were actually cast, computer analyst Harri Hursti “stuffed the ballot box” by entering votes on the computer’s memory card. Then, after votes were cast, the results displayed when the same memory card was entered in the central tabulating program indicated that fraud was indeed possible. In other words, by accessing a memory card before an election, someone could change the results - a claim Diebold had denied was possible.