Why is no candidate talking about Verified Voting?

It's sad really, that a topic that everybody pretty much agrees on, that everybody should have the ability to vote and know their vote accounted, has turned into something divisive and fracturing.

I used to have high hopes that Rep. Holt's bill in the house would pass in the Republican congress, after all it had plenty of Republican co-sponsors, and there had been multiple companion bills in the Senate. That didn't happen, the Republican leadership would never let it come to a vote.

Now we have a Democratic congress, and while we hold only a bare majority in the Senate, still the legislation never ends up coming to a vote.

Moreover, anytime "irregularities" show up, people are immediately divided up into "deniers" and "fraudsters".

While it is true that you can't blame every electoral loss or mishap on "Diebold", it is also foolish to pretend that the problem doesn't exist or that "the states have it under control."

In some cases this is true, but why fight 50 battles when we don't have to?

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X'posted to Dailykos

Not all of us who advocate for verified voting are doomsayers who do no actual work.

Some of us have been doing work at the grassroots level before 98% of the people in the blogosphere even knew or cared what these machines were. I'll use myself as an example, years ago when Diebold was still considered "hunky dory" in California, I led a letter writing campaign to then Democratic Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. This letter writing campaign consisted of a clear and reasoned argument against the security of these touch screen machines. They run off of MS Access, are ridiculously easy to hack and have proven flaws that are always patched and never fixed. Speaking as somebody working within the IT field I came up with a reasonable set of "talking points" and distributed them to friends and colleagues who were also concerened.

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