Tom Stoppard, the playwright, once said: "It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

Well, in this country, voting and counting are dominated by corporate, monopolistic, proprietary e-voitng companies where the results for voting and counting are unverifiable, hackable computer systems.

So, votes and counts can be manipulated and the voter has no proof, even with paper receipts, that her/his vote has been recorded and/or counted correctly.

Yet, having been wined and dined by e-voting machine companies, state and county election officials jumped on the undemocratic, dangerously flawed, and failed e-voting bandwagon.  We the people voting has become we the corporations controlling the voting process.

Many election integrity watchdogs have been warning about the hijacking of the voting process by e-voting companies for more than a decade.   And the primaries in New York and Delaware offer more proof of this terrible system.

From Bradblog comes this: 

"New York is the last state in the union to replace their older election system --- much of the state, as well as all of New York City had previously used mechanical lever machines --- with new-fangled, failure-prone, easily-manipulated computerized systems following the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which was enacted in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election debacle.

"In New York City, where Wall Street Journal reports the problems are "most severe" --- including reports from Mayor Bloomberg on "reports of broken and missing scanners, poor customer service and poll sites opening two to four hours late" --- the new systems are made by ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company, and one with a storied history of election failures.

"The systems used in other parts of the state are largely manufactured by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting, formerly as a partnership with Sequoia Voting Systems. Dominion eventually bought out cash-strapped Sequoia's portion of the NY state deal before buying out Sequoia entirely earlier this year. The purchase of Sequoia, then the nation's third-largest e-voting firm, on the heels of their purchase of Diebold/Premiere just weeks prior, has vaulted Dominion, virtually overnight, to one of the largest e-voting vendors in the U.S..

"Some state election officials and Election Integrity advocates alike had long-warned against the implementation of these new systems, going so far as to take the issue to court and to testify to the inability of certifying the accuracy of elections run on the new machines.

"And there's this democracy-inspiring note from the NYT's report [emphasis added]:

"Setting aside the "system error" on "every ballot", the most disturbing point in the above may be what we've been trying to warn the world about here at The BRAD BLOG for years: "Presumably the thing was actually tallied".

"There is, of course, no way to know if "the thing was actually tallied", without actually bothering to count paper ballots by hand to know for certain, thus defeating the general point of using these horrible systems in the first place."

And this:

Delaware has just three counties, all of which force voters to use 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen, but in this case push-button) voting systems on Election Day. The systems are made by Danaher Controls, one of the smaller, lesser-known e-voting companies in the U.S., though large enough to have been made infamous when hundreds of their machines reportedly broke down during Philadelphia's May 2006 trainwreck election. In 2004 Verified Voting and the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a short paper [PDF] detailing various other problems with the systems in Tennessee and Ohio elections going back to 1992.

While we've yet to hear of problems today on the machines in the "First State", we thought it might be a good time to mention that no matter who the voting machines report as the winner in any of the races, including the hotly-contested GOP Senate primary, there will largely be next to nothing that can be done to challenge the results --- other than, perhaps, counting the smaller number of paper-based absentee ballots for accuracy. (The paper-based absentee ballots will initially be tabulated by Diebold AccuVote op-scan systems, the same type of system used to flip the results of a mock election in HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch that hack here as it occurred live.)

The Danaher DRE's being used in Delaware today make for 100% faith-based elections. As with all DREs, after the polls close tonight it will be strictly impossible to verify that even one vote cast on them was recorded accurately as per the voters' intent, for any candidate on the ballot.

UPDATE 7:15pm PT: With 85% of the vote "counted", and a reported 54%-46% margin, AP has declared O'Donnell the winner. Details...

UPDATE: 10:32pm PT: Castle actually defeated O'Donnell! But, um, only on the ballots that can actually be verified. Details in comments...

So, with these easily manipulated, failure-prone e-voting and counting systems, how can the voters and voting officials trust this terrible process?  Which candidates actually won?