From the appearance of things it seems that Americans don’t really care about their votes. The fancy-shmancy Electronic voting machines used in the US have been proven to be insecure and unrealiable. They are known to count votes wrongly, fail to operate and are vulnerable to many different forms of attack. The company that makes these machines claims that it is because the the government does not want to spend enough money to make the machines secure and reliable like banks make their ATMs.
However a comparison with India’s voting machines (from 2004 – since then Diebold Voting Machines changed its name to Premier to distance its ATM and voting businesses but still makes the same crap voting machine) shows that voting machines need not be unneccesarily complex and difficult to operate or run. Also there is no oversight on the machines at all. A private corporation writes all the software that runs on voting machines and that code is not made available even to the government or the political parties for testing or inspection of any kind and there are no proper regulations that it has to meet. How much America cares about the fairness of the elections can be easily told from this comparison of regulations on gambling machines vs. voting machines
So does it really matter if you vote in America? Maybe if you trust Diebold not to rig the machines and all the smart hackers in the world not to hack the machines.
In Oregon we don’t have voting machines. We have mail in voting, it appears to be a very successful system. Maybe the rest of the country should try learning a little bit more from their ‘country mouse’ state…