My grandmother sat on the ballots in a polling station in the early twentieth century to keep Tammany Hall goons from falsifying the votes. They'd hide a pencil lead underneath a fingernail and make extraneous marks on the ballots.
My mother filed at least one report on voting irregularities in her days as a poll watcher and I've continued the family tradition both in my home district and in another state as an impartial observer.
I've even attended one of the annual meetings of the Caltech/MIT Electronic Voting Project.
Video of my small scale solar experiments at http://solarray.blogspot.com/...
(I live halfway between Harvard and MIT and that particular meeting happened to be at the 'Tute.) One thing I learned there is that these guys are really serious about making sure there's an open and fair vote count for everybody, including the disabled (a big reason why the move to electronic voting) but that they have no clue about the depths of cheating we now have to contend with.
It's like the Amazing Randi says, the easiest people to fool for phoney psychics and faith healers are scientists. You need a magician to see the sleight of hand.
We need to demand that our votes be counted accurately, honestly, and verifiably no matter how many elections have been stolen and the prevailing "'twas always thus" attitude. If you want your vote to count, do your damnedest to make sure the system is honest or rest easy being a gullible fool.
Now, how do we do that? HR 550? Absentee ballots for all? Independent exit polls of our own? A blogstorm organized around this issue? A 50 state strategy for election integrity? Any other ideas?
Please, let's not rehash whether 2000 or 2004 were stolen. My focus is on how to keep anyone from stealing the elections of 2006 and 2008.