We always struggle with the difference between reality and assumptions.
These are not your grandfather's elections. The centralization of computer voting enables election manipulation with one touch in a foreign country or even from Florida.
DID YOU KNOW the computer-based voting machine NH uses to count up to 85% of our votes is the SAME Diebold AccuVote model that recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Florida in 2000?
http://blackboxvoting.org/
More and more voters will be finished voting by the Nov 4 election day, but our minds can't grasp that the final two weeks of campaigning is useless. What is hardest to understand is that the reliable integrity of elections has been deliberately attacked and is totally compromised.
For instance, we have in our minds the idea that elections are fair, and that the addition of technology has improved democracy, that county officials are neutral and willing to do the job, and that there is money at the county level to run elections.
Unfortunately the little old ladies who ran our local county elections have yielded their volunteer jobs to highly partisan folks.
Sometimes it is obvious, for example:
My first time voting with a machine was done without any screen around the machine and without any privacy, as a man come over, peered over my shoulder to ostensibly "help" me. I felt threatened.
The movie Hacking Democracy should be playing now all over the country, as it explained the discovery that the technology was a seriously vulnerable change in our system.
Now we have a BUSINESS of election computer processingj:
monopoly in the voting machiine builder (1 company)
proprietary (private) programs to count the vote with NO oversight
None of these are being followed.
middlemen in companies subcontracted to manage the voting
in which there is nobody to make sure that they follow the rules for a good election.
For example, ONE list of registered voters who can vote,
ONE database in one election with no downloads during an election
OPEN access to the paper records in the machines (poll tapes) which are supposed to be preserved for later verification.
POSTING RESULTS on the LOCAL polling place door, so people could take a picture and compare with middlemen productions