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On the Issues PROS & CONS ON PAPER BALLOTS A thank you to Brina-Rae Schuchman for providing the pro-paper ballot arguments and to Paul Lehto for providing the arguments against using paper ballots ARGUMENTS FAVORING THE USE OF PAPER BALLOTS ELECTION DAY There is no usable proof of a touch screen vote being counted as cast... The votes on the paper rolls may be different from the way the vote is recorded electronically for the reported vote count. Diebold's secretive, proprietary software program makes the authenticity of the final vote count questionable. The ability of one "smart card" to change the final vote count also leaves the final vote count questionable. The roll-paper erases easily and smears and curls up making the roll-paper a poor recount tool. The paper ballot counts are more trustworthy than the count from touch screen voting machines. Paper ballots can be verified by the voter and are handled separately from the touch screen ballots. Paper ballots are more easily handled, scanned, and hand-counted. None of our votes are certain when they are in any Diebold machines. Over 406,000 Absentee Ballots have been issued to date in San Diego County and requests are still coming in. In the '02 Governor's General Election only 78.79% of absentee votes were returned. ARGUMENTS OPPOSING THE USE OF PAPER BALLOTS ON ELECTION DAY Whichever candidate comes in with the higher touch screen (DRE) total on election night will be perceived by the press and public as the winner. The DRE totals are the first seen by the press and public and carry the unofficial designation of winner. Thus, the candidate whose followers vote on paper will be behind on election night and the day after and the party using paper will have to play catch-up as the provisionals and paper ballots are slowly counted over days. The use of paper ballots will provide an explanation for false voting results on DREs that are in fact fraudulently-hacked results. The true, non-fraudulent vote count may not be seen until weeks later after the fraudulent vote-count candidate has been sworn into office. This will be enough to suppress stories about the election numbers, once again, providing plausibility to the DRE results. If the Registrar declares that counting the paper ballots will not affect the outcome of the election, the paper ballots may not even be counted. There appears to be a reasonably strong case that all such emergency paper ballots could be declared "illegal votes" just like the San Diego mayoral write-ins were illegal votes for technical reasons and would not count and could be stricken in an election contest. -->Click here to download a copy<--