>>>The sad part is that the owners are Chinese and are trying to get their citizenship. They were so startled and dissappointed. One of the owners told my daughter that he couldn't believe it - it was almost just like China here afterall. The only difference was that you could say no and they wouldn't drag you down there to vote as they wanted you to or threaten your family if you didn't.
>>
>>Well, there ya go - if it can happen in the land of the free, imagine what goes on elsewhere ...
>
>Elsewhere there's the overall assumption that the system is corrupt and that there'll be attempts to stuff the ballots by this or that party, so nobody trusts anybody and everybody watches over everybody else. The vote counters are at least three people, if there are more then three parties, they can have observers. Each party sends the results to its local HQ, and they all total them independently at their central HQs and the same hierarchy in the state apparatus, and they all publish it immediately on their websites - any discrepancy, be it by two votes, is obvious right away.
>
>Now if those backwater countries can do it, surely the great superpower could do as well, if it wanted to.

So you'd think, but the trend seems to be to replace human oversight with machine, with voting machines.

I attended a (non-VFP) user group meeting a couple of weeks ago. There was a presentation by Rocket Gaming, a maker of video slot machines. The processes they have to go through are quite impressive:

- they have to "harden" their machines against very inventive crooks - various mechanical tools, modified cattle prods etc.
- they have to submit literally every line of source code to code review teams at each of the gaming commissions with which they're licensed

Contrast that with voting machines, which are proprietary and ridiculously vulnerable to near-trivial hacks.

Your money is arguably a lot safer in a video slot on an Indian reservation, than your vote is in some voting machines.