Palast on verified voting

You know I'm a big proponent of paper ballots but Greg Palast in an op-ed at BuzzFlash reminds me that they're no panacea for fraud. As evidenced by the brouhaha going on in Mexico right now, any system is vulnerable to manipulation and he notes an holistic approach is necessary to cure the problem.

And just as in Mexico, the "null" vote, the trashed, spoiled, rejected ballots, overrode the voters' choice, so it was north of the Rio Grande in 2000 and 2004. Ballot spoilage, not computer manipulation, stole Ohio and Florida in those elections -- and will steal Colorado and New Mexico in the 2008 election.

In other words, my fellow gringo activists, we'd better stop fixating on laptop legerdemain and pledge our lives and fortunes to stopping the games played with registration rolls, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, voter ID demands and the less glamorous, yet horribly effective, methods used to suppress, invalidate and otherwise ambush the vote.

And isn't that just what we're seeing here right now? If we're going to take back the country, there's no more vital issue than restoring a verifiable vote.