The public was heavily reassured that the bipartisan boards of elections were a solid safeguard for our elections. Not only did this ignore the obvious deadlock at 2 Dems and 2 Reps with Blackwell getting the tiebreaking vote, and even the Dems more or less serving at Blackwell’s pleasure, but as the Cuyahoga convictions prove, ONCE ELECTIONS OFFICIALS ARE COMMITTED to their first-announced results, many of them would rather commit felonies and rig recounts than admit they were wrong, incompetent in finding fraud, or guilty of fraud themselves, or even just risk being in a media fishbowl of scrutiny and publicity for a while. Rigging the recounts looked awfully attractive at that point, and Blackwell winked a lot too.

So, while multi-partisan elections officials who are watching the FIRST count like hawks can be a reliable check and balance, those very same elections officials are at serious risk of being lackadaisacal and unmotivated (at best) and grossly negligent and intentionally criminal (at worst) in terms of mis-executing recount (and “audit”) jobs.

Every “audit” legislation I can think of right now has the government elections officials auditing THEMSELVES. Sheesh. The emperor has no clothes at so many different levels it is simply astounding. And so, in CA like San Diego, they select the “random” precincts through Diebold computers (!) or through dice before the first count is even finished, but in either case, they know before the first count is even finished which 99% of the precincts can be completely faulty or rigged and it won’t be detected.

After the first results are announced, only the public can really do the job as watchdogs because they don’t have a large vested interest like all the elections officials do in their reputation for doing “good work” and in their desire to have a real nice Thanksgiving week with family…