United States Postal Service and the change to postmarks

 More information.

NOW can we agree that electronic voting

DOES NOT WORK and get back to basics? Such as paper voting that allows for recounts and makes it harder to change when the voters are not looking.

Brad Friedman documents the event on his post: My Own Votes, Four of Them, Were Flipped Yesterday Before My Very Eyes:

What follows is yet another one of those stories, where a voter had vote selections flipped by the electronic voting system, such that candidates were chosen other than the ones intended to be selected by the voter, though no fault of his own.

But this time, the voter is me.

The citizens of the US accept as fact that this country is founded on one man, one vote. Prove it by giving all of us back paper ballots.

All your votes are belong to us

Literally.

"A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.

Update 12/19: Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat in comments mentioned that Colorado is addressing this problem:

DENVER (AP) — Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch was installed.

Other machines that failed could be replaced with equipment certified for use in other states, Secretary of State Mike Coffman said.

Coffman met with a task force of state lawmakers to discuss what Colorado should do the day after he decertified three of the four voting equipment manufacturers allowed in the state, affecting six of Colorado's 10 most populous counties.

California's disguised petitions

If you sign petitions, read every page where you put your signature.

Susie of Suburban Guerrilla:

I should note that the clipboard is arranged such that a rubber band holding the petitions to the cardboard is positioned on the top of the page, across the actual ballot language in question - thus, partially hiding the text of the ballot initiatives on pages 2-4 unless you actually stop and pull down the top of the page.

I agreed to sign the cancer initiative, but the comment about signing four times raised a red flag, because I’m familiar with the structure of ballot petitions, so I paused before signing and looked at the other initiatives. However, I’m absolutely sure that most of the people signing, young college students on a rush to get their lunches and off to class, did not take this step.

What they are doing is getting people to sign for ballot initiatives without their knowledge or informed consent, using young peoples’ desire to do a good thing and their lack of familiarity with the legal paperwork of initiative petitions. If this is not illegal it is certainly deeply unethical. The moment I realized what was going on, I told the petitioners that they shouldn’t be telling people to sign for ballot initiatives they’re not aware of. Immediately after, I called the school newspaper, the Daily Nexus, the Courage Campaign, the Santa Barbara Democratic Central Committee, and the California Democratic Party.

Perhaps if you see this happening, tell the petition collectors that even though they are being paid by the signature or by the hour, you're going to report them for obtaining signatures under false pretenses. Would this work? Sadly ... there is no law to protect us from voters being absolute dumbshits.

Read each petition that you sign.

Update 11/16: More links.