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Political parties are a big part of the problem here in the states. The framers of our constitution did not anticipate the rise of political parties, and George Washington spoke against them in his farewell address. The two major parties here in the US have consolidated power and intentionally impeded the ability additional parties to have any influence in elections or legislation.

One good example of this is the current rule on filibustering which has made the process to a simple administrative chore requiring a 60% vote to break. No longer can one man halt all other activity against the will of even his own party and stand for what he knows is right. Another good example is the change to eligibility requirements and governance of the presidential debates. Where previously the League of Women Voters maintained a fair and open debate process, now the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization controlled by corporate sponsors, has created minimum eligibility requirements that include a 15% share of the popular vote "as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations." This puts the requirements out of the reach of third party candidates who need the national exposure that the debates would give them to garner that much popular support.

The last reference above has a great comment from Alan Keyes that I feel deserves inclusions here.

Regarding the criteria regarding who should be admitted to the Presidential Debates, Keyes said it wasn't a difficult question and shouldn't require too much imagination. Keyes went on to say that one reasonable criteria would be that any Presidential Candidate who qualifies for ballot position in enough states to have the possibility of winning the 270 votes necessary to be elected president - should be included in the debates.

everyone I know wipes down their entire pistol, inside and out, any time they come in contact with it.
Generally speaking, the only time the dozen or so shooters I personally know, including myself, "wipe down" a firearm is to clean it. Even then, the "wipe down" isn't intended to remove fingerprints, it is to remove residue left from burnt powder and such. So, yes, it is possible to have a print-less firearm, but it is also very unusual.

Every time I clean any of my firearms, I wipe all prints off it.
Did you buy any of those from any source other than a private individual who doesn't know your name, with cash? If not, then the gov't already knows who they belong to, or can find out in very short order (call manufacturer, call distributor, call dealer, read dealer's paperwork). No, I don't believe this is proper, but that is the situation at present.

Hell, if someone raped your wife, and you had a chance to kill him, wouldn't you?
There are very few instances where someone (a civilian) can use lethal force against another: to stop a felony in progress, to prevent a felon from leaving the scene where he just committed a felony, and when the shooter or another "innocent" near the shooter is in danger of losing their life and/or suffering great bodily harm. There is no legal allowance for after-the-fact vengeance of any sort - you cannot legally hunt someone down and kill them no matter the crime. So, to answer your question, no - that's the police/jury/executioner's job.

I do not operate under the assumption that the entire local gov't is corrupt. I would hope that in areas where such may be the case that the matter is already known to the local populace and they are actively working to resolve the matter quickly and with appropriate measures. I am well aware that such corruption has happened in the past (and is likely to happen again in the future), but, as you can see, the populace worked it out.
Therefore, I go about my business as a typical law-abiding citizen, who sees the police and associated gov't as generally and mostly honest, just as I assume most normal people I meet on the street to be. If given cause to think otherwise, I deal with that appropriately, and on a case-by-case basis.

The numbers on the counters are manually recorded, then manually transferred to a central registrar. That's two places with human intervention, and opportunity for error or, more remotely, fraud

There are at least four witnesses to the counting: the deputy returning officer and the poll clerk, who are nominated by the two leading parties, and at least two from the public (who are usually, but not necessarily, agents of two different candidates)

All the totals get printed in the newspapers so the witnesses can check their own poll and anyone can check the sums

Your system does nothing like that. Even where the ballots are counted by hand, all the numbers disappear into Voter News Service, which then reports what it wants. (I don't know what's replaced VNS. I understand it was dissolved after it so badly botched the con in 2000. It was a pretty secret society and its successor can be expected to be even more so.)

People want to know sooner than the morning paper

The results don't take effect for months; why the fuck the indecent hurry?

BTW all I get out of the forum anchor is "cyclic link". I guess konqi users are locked out >:(

It is a sham. It's been a sham for decades.

>It was a result of outdated technology and a ballot that was confusing to read.

Not quite. There was also the roughly 90000 eligible voters (from predominantly Democrat demographics) Shrubadub's FL campaign manager Kathy Harris (masquerading as Brother JEB's sec'y of State) barred from the polls on false accusations of criminality (with a wee bit of he'p from Texas-based ChoicePoint).

And one of the most interesting occurrences was with the brandspanking new technology: one of the "voting" machines in Volusia country registered -16022 Gore votes and 9880 Socialist Workers Party votes...in a precinct of about 585 registered electors...and the stupid central computer accepted the negative number.

>In our country, people after the fact sat down and counted each vote by hand.

In my country, each vote is counted by hand to PRODUCE the fact, with witnesses from the public, and poll-by-poll numbers are in the newspapers within days so the sums can be checked and the witnesses can check the raw numbers.

In your country, all the numbers got sent to a thing called Voters News Service, which would then report what it wanted and the witnesses and officials in the polls could go fu@k themselves. Really. Check what happened in Dubuque Co. Iowa in the 1996 caucuses.

And after all that work...it was still close enough the Hedge called upon the Supreme Court to STOP the count and appoint a winner.

I laugh my @ss off at you. If that happened anywhere else we'd call the spade a little tinpot African dicatatorship and get on with life. But just beacuse it's the US we gotta wring our hands and say "well, mistakes happen."

And you think more "voting" machines are going to help? Machines cannot be trusted to count ballots, even if they're open to inspection, which is explicitly prohibited in US machines, even to election officials, under nonsense of "protection of trade secrets." Counting is a trade-fu@king-secret? Trade-fu@king-secrets overrides public trust in the last dreg of its diluted democracy? God they think we're stupid. (I think, unfortunately, they're mostly right.)

Ballots are only counted by hand - can only be counted by hand - if paper copies exist. (And your ballots only get counted by hand if there's a protest, which simply means the riggers have to be sure to get enough spread no recount is permitted.) The new "voting" machines make no paper records. The effort to have them make paper records is being vigourously resisted, even though most of the efforts aren't even asking for any more than a piece of paper the voter checks and then discards.

(And don't you think it's funny to yammer in one sentence about "outdated technology" and then turn around and talk about hand counting as the final check - hand counting which involved, in the main, the tangible ballots that same outdated technology used?)

But hey, as regimes like yours like to say, if you're doing nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide, right?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but right-wing conspiracy theorists were there long before the left wing commies. See votefraud.org and votescam.com for examples. I don't know whether there's really a conspiracy like they believe, but they've been trying to make people aware of these issues since 1992 (votescam) and 1996 (votefraud).

THE REAL SCOOP ON DIEBOLD

Other links:

A VERY AMERICAN COUP
Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
How the system integrity problem was discovered.
The Greatest Cover-Up Of All: Vote Fraud In America

"What this kind of thing amounts to is election fixing."

FYI, the proper term is "vote fraud"