AlterNet is asking "Should Voting Machine Manufacturers Be Sued Like BigTobacco?"

The loud, resounding answer from American voters should be, "Hell, yes!"

The article quotes John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, "It is our view at Voter Action that this whole question must be brought to a new level," said John Bonifaz, the group's legal director. "It is akin to the scrutiny that finally was applied to the big tobacco companies, with respect to what they knew and when they knew the effects of the products that they were marketing."

Activist electronic voting watchdog groups and individuals like BradBlog, BlackBoxVoting, VerifiedVoting.org, have been sounding the alarm about electronic voting machines, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) or touch screen, for the almost a decade.

Bush stole the 2000 presidential election with the help of the Supreme Court and probably stole the 2004 election with the help of DREs.  Who knows how many federal, state and local offices have been stolen by Republicans since DRE's became the norm after 2002? DREs appeared everywhere thanks to a Republican controlled Congress passing HAVA so that Republican owned electronic voting machine companies could make billions at the county, state and federal money troughs funded by taxpayers and rig votes undetected to insure that Republican candidates won. It's time for voters to emphatically say "enough, sue the bastards!"

As John Bonifaz states, "But the overall push on this is to reclaim public control of public elections and the dangers associated with outsourcing of our elections to private companies for certain key election functions."

But I agree with PoliticsPlus. This is not just about defective equipment but fraud that has been cited and denounced ad infinitum by watchdog groups and computer experts. These companies should be sued for perpetrating fraud by illegally stealing, flipping, and/or erasing Americans' votes leaving virtually no trace, but was discovered by mathematical and computer experts as statistical anomalies or impossibilities.

Unfortunately with the current political realities: no effective Democratic House or Senate leadership; Bush's politicized government (look what the DOJ did regarding compensation to American taxpayers from Big Tobacco); not all states have Secretaries of State like Democrat, Debra Bowen of California; secretaries of state and local registrars were wined and dined by these companies to purchase their product and these state and local officials are perfectly content to continue with the status quo, screwing the voters.

Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced a bill in the Senate yesterday, November 1, to ban DRE machines:

RESTRICTION ON USE OF DIRECT RECORDING ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS -
A direct recording electronic voting system may not be used to administer any election for Federal office held in 2012 or any subsequent year.

But, as you can see, it's only for federal office and doesn't go into effect until 2012!

While better than Senator Feinstein (D-CA) or Rep. Holt's (D-NJ) bills, neither of which banned DRE machines, 2012 is too long to wait.  Five more years of stolen votes is unacceptable.

Ban DREs now and use paper ballots.