Reply #55: You are missing an important point...

[mirrera]

The amount of votes aren't changing, just switched from one column to another. A precinct might know what their count is, but they will not know what the other precincts counts are. When they all come together, unless there is something glaring, there would be no reason to re-count. This makes it very easy to switch a few votes so that where Kerry was expected to win he wins by a little less. If you re-count woops, we bad, he won by a little more. Where Bush was expected to win he wins big...they re-count and he wins by less. That happened a lot. You do that accross the country and you've got your self some "political capital" I am glad Andy pointed you to Chuck Herrin who also thinks Paper ballots hand counted have the most integrity. He lists the priorities like this:

Hand Counted:
Integrity
Accuracy
speed

Scanned:
Speed
Accuracy
Integrity

So we are trading what we all use as the beacon of integrity;
hand counting, for speed.
Then we add back more hand counting to add more integrity.
Why not just hand count?
Because Election officials are made to feel old fashioned by voting machine reps?
We coul keep the cost of the scanner and give the workers a bonus.

Chuck's site has the software on it so you can see how easy it is to hack.