Back when Dysfunctional You was still a terrific place to learn things, I studied this issue. I hope many people watch your clip, but I'm going to have to skip it, because contemplation of the death of our democracy dumps me back into the black despair I felt then.
There's a lot of information out there if you know where to look, and there are some people who are sincerely trying to turn the tide. I recommend looking into the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here's their Wikipedia page and their website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_...Foundation
http://www.eff.org/
http://www.eff.org/search?text=electroni...g+machines
Also, googling for "non-renewal of Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting machine contracts" brings up a lot of info, as does "2011 status of Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting machine contracts"
When the Bushes and Supreme Court engineered a bloodless coup in 2000, the Republican Party was a well-established practitioner of old-fashioned illegal voter-suppression techniques. These are things that take no electronic magic at all and are too numerous to mention, but they work.
However, the Bush administration used the malfunctioning of badly maintained manually operated voting machines as an excuse to "help" us "modernize" by mandating the use of electronic voting machines. Incidentally, the owners of the companies that supplied them were known associates of the Bushes. Big surprise, right?
The problem with computers is that the average person thinks they are magic, and they tend to ignore the fact that they routinely crash, leaving no usable data. The average person -- including all your bureaucrats and elected officials, HAVE NO IDEA HOW COMPUTERS WORK. They're magic. So "technicians" have entered polling places to replace motherboards in the middle of election day (Riverside, CA) and late-night vote counting has miraculously turned losers into winners before our very eyes.
As Stalin is reported to have said: It doesn't matter who gets the votes, only who counts the votes.* He would have absolutely loved Diebold and Sequoia.
The media has been spectacularly unhelpful. Exit polls used to be considered an infallible means of predicting elections, but when they suddenly inexplicably failed, the media gave them up without so much as a whimper, much less a battle to determine what kind of tampering had produced such radically unexpected results.
John Kerry said he had lawyers standing by, but then he didn't fight the results in places where it could have made a difference.
Barack Obama gave me more hope than I had had in years when he responded to a concerned citizen's letter late in the campaign (about this issue) by saying NOT THIS TIME. (Again, this was reported at that other discussion board.) Thank God, I thought, he knows. I don't know what his crew did besides getting out a grassroots landslide, but we won.
I wish I knew what his administration has been doing about the problem since then. In my darkest moments I think the real powers-that-be "let" this good president win the election -- this time.
Hekate
* My version of the Stalin quote is concise, but I just had to go hunt for a citation:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubious..._quote.htm
A historical source has been found for one variant of this quote: Boris Bazhanov's Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary, published in 1992 and so far as I know only available in Russian.
The pertinent passage, which appears near the end of Chapter Five, reads as follows (loosely translated):
"You know, comrades," says Stalin, "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.
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