Agreed. That should be one of the first things addressed in 2009.

Most of us fail to realize that our daily use of computers includes constant implicit auditing. (Think "WYSIWYG": If we don't see the right appearance in your word processor, we keep at it until you get what you want. Same with spreadsheets, if the results look weird, we keep adjusting. We dial a number, and if the wrong person answers, we try again.)

Voting is unique in the transition from private selection where the voter is still associated with her choices to public counting where the choices must be preserved but separated from the voters.

Most people don't recognize this unique and subtle distinction. It could be argued that the original developers of DRE technologies failed completely to recognize it.

I won't even get into the fact that many people still experience this stuff as almost "magical": All this stuff happens without most of us being aware of all the work and complexity that went into the appearance of it working so well.

Finally: In most circumstances, every participant in a system has a financial interest in its perfection; despite this priority, our (developers) products still have bugs and need to release fixes, etc. Voting is one of the rare situations where some actors have an interest in "altering" the results of the process undetected. In today's environment of high-value political gamesmanship, the stakes are enormous which presents temptations to bad actors that they may not be able to resist.

"Recently, I wrote to Eric Schmidt at Google and suggested that perhaps he and his band of developers could do the country a favor and design something to put Diebold permanently out of business."

I think Jobs and Gates did that way back in the 20th Century, now we call them PC's or Macs, but we've had that "something" for decades, we just haven't had the political will,nor the public majority, to create an online voting system.

Not that it would address every issue and every voter, but it would certainly give those of us who live at the keyboard a very simple way to avoid long election-day voting lines, and maybe eliminate those long lines altogether.

Computers, their open-source developers, and the incredible internet they spawned are the answer to more than one of our patent problems with democracy.

Think "VIRTUAL CONGRESS."

Build our lawmakers a world-class website that allows them to discuss, debate and decide from the comfort of their home offices, in their home districts, in their home states, and get them out of The Swamp where the K-Street vultures can pick their bones clean.

Just food for thought.
Viva la Blogs!

In Minnesota, we use a sheet of paper and a pen. You fill in ovals with the pen and then shove the thing into a scanner/tabulator. The only problem this year seems to be people who put an X in the oval or a checkmark instead of filling it completely in. It's also the reason Franken could win here. Many first time voters apparently made that mistake. From what I understand, their votes still count, but the scanner sometimes didn't catch them. It will take awhile to verify the votes, but I'm guessing any errors will work to Franken's benefit.

Oh, for the days of dropping a black ball or white ball in a box.

It is good to see Bradblog, Brad Friedman's blog referenced here, at least in passing, he's been on this issue exhaustively.

And as for the New Hampshire primary, well, just remember what Rove and Mehlman did there in the Senate race in 2002. Their cadre of fake Dems caller-ID'ed the Dems phone banks, then called those numbers in to the White House political office, where they were disseminated to phone-jamming operatives.

NH needs to take a very, very close look at that event, even closer than they already have.

New Hampshire's eastern geography and early voting status made it a ripe target for the Rovian machine, much easier than early Iowa to influence from such long distance.

And that small army of fake Dems Rove installed in 2001-02 may well have been at work in Hillary's primary win, either in skewing the polls with exit lies, and/or enabling a Diebold deception, too.