Have I mentioned today how much I hate these people?

Excuse me, but can the American People please tear themselves away from decade-old footage of JonBenet Ramsey shaking her bikini-clad six-year-old booty long enough to wake the fuck up and realize what's happening to the electoral process in this country?

F***ing Florida again:

Voting Machines Sitting in FL Living Rooms

by Alf Ranken

Fri Aug 18, 2006 at 07:16:33 PM PDT

I just returned from Poll Watcher training in Duval County Florida. Early Voting for the Primary begins Monday. I caught the most interesting tidbit while hanging around the Democratic HQ. Apparently, since Early Voting starts "early in the morning" Monday, the (Republican) Supervisor of Elections decided it was best to send the voting machines home for the weekend with the poll workers. Yeah, I am not f'ing making that up! And yes, I did fall out of my chair, lose my hearing and vision and swear like a drunk sailor when I heard this. It's so ridiculous that only a Republican could come up with this plan.

They could've hired 14 small trucks to deliver 4 voting machines to one location in each of the 14 Districts. That would be the professional thing to do. But they thought it better to pack their employees' personal vehicles up with 4 machines each so they could take them home over the weekend and deliver them "early in the morning" to the Early Voting sites on Monday.

Now, it's totally absurd to think that voting machines are sitting in living rooms and garages, and maybe even cars, all over Jacksonville for weekend. It's even more absurd when you go online to http://duvalelections.com/... and discover that the polls don't open until 10AM on Monday!! But even if they opened at 6AM, I think there would be a better way to handle this. I assume they're going to do this for the General Election as well.

What are they thinking? I mean, at the very least you'd think they would TRY to perform SOME preventative measures to protect those machines or at least pretend like they are.

The best part? The person who told me this was informed by the Supervisor of Elections himself during a PR thing designed to make us feel better about voting machine security.

At this point, I say let's just use paper ballots and have U.N. election monitors watch over the whole thing, since Republican Secretaries of State have absolutely no interest in the integrity of the process.