A few years back in a post election analysis, a particular precinct's ballots were examined. A huge number of them were marked Straight Party vote. Now that's one thing I'd abolish!

Quote Originally Posted by SoonerDave View Post
You beat me to it, Jim. I have a fair amount of skepticism about the relative (lack of) trustworthiness of our government, but given the way they process the ballots, there's just no way you could do it.

I walk in, sign an alphabetically ordered voter registration list (with no indication of the order in which the voters arrived, nor ballot number issued), I'm given the next ballot on the pad...someone else walks in, same process...and I stick my ballot into the machine and it makes its happy-gloopy noise, and its done. I just don't see how in that process that ballot is positively linked to me.

Under the most propeller-headed scenario I can think of, someone would have to maintain a separate registration list on the QT and secretly mark the number of my ballot after they handed it to me, and then manually associate that ballot back to me after the polls closed - unless, in even a more propeller-headed paranoid scenario, they uploaded that "secret" list into the ballot box and the firmware therein did the mapping and produced a list separately. I mean, at some point, c'mon, folks....