A risk to voting a straight ticket?

[caty]

I happened across an article from three years ago about how voting a straight ticket makes is easier to rig an election and I'm wondering if it still is an issue.

"The failure of various aspects of our election system is a serious issue. A few examples of this are a single machine in Florida in 2000 counted negative 16,000 votes for Al Gore. The difference between Gore and Bush in that state was less than 1,000 votes. And in the 2008 primaries, over 1 million Indiana voters were purged from voter registration lists. These residents were mostly in minority-dominated communites, which tend to vote Democratic.

An email to supporters of the organization Black Box Voting, an organization devoted to fixing flaws in voting machines, informed them of votes being miscounted or not counted at all when the straight party option was chosen."

" HOW TO PROTECT THE COUNT against Straight Party Trap:

NEVER CHOOSE THE STRAIGHT PARTY VOTE OPTION, because it alerts the computer as to your party preference and allows software code to trigger whatever function the programmer has designed.
SEND THIS INFORMATION OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, blog it, root n' toot it out there to get the word out.
ESPECIALLY GET THE WORD OUT TO PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING STATES, which have straight party voting options:

Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin"

more..... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/10/626697/-Thinking-of-voting-a-straight-Democratic-ticket-Think-again



An old article, yes. But I'm wondering if it still applies today. On the safe side, I will never vote a straight ticket again. I will vote for each Democrat individually.

[MineralMan]

1. In Minnesota, there's no option for voting a straight ticket.

There wasn't in California, where I used to live, either. I think it's a very bad idea in general. People should think about each vote they make.

[elocs]

2. This is DU: there's no such thing as an article too old to post, or a story too old to repost.

I can vote straight ticket here in Wisconsin, but I like connecting the line beside each candidate's name.

[dragonlady]

3. Actually, Fitzwalkerstan ended straight ticket voting

Not sure why, because somewhere I read that Republicans used it more than Democrats. It was part of their package of voting "reforms."

[elocs]

4. Didn't know that, but then I never chose to vote the straight ticket method. n/t

[caty]

5. I've voted

a straight Dem ticket ever since it was set up that way on our ballets. I won't anymore. However, we do have a paper trail for our voting. We mark our choices on a paper ballot that is then served into a machine that adds up the results. If there was a question, those paper ballots could always be counted by hand. There should always be a paper ballot to back up what the machines report.