Looks like Rush Holt’s bill is going to finally make it to the House floor. Check out EFF’s DeepLink on the subject for a bunch of arguments for the bill, as well as rebuttals to arguments against it.

Sounds like a very good idea to me.

Brad says in that article that the House version will distinguish between “provisional” ballots, filed if you aren’t sure if you should be voting, and “contingency” ballots, which are fully valid. I think that’s the version that needs to pass (contingent on what it actually says, of course).

Avi Rubin, a Comp Sci professor at Johns Hopkins, worked at a precinct on primary day with Diebold e-voting machines, and tells us about the various things that went wrong.

The Columbus Dispatch took polls before the recent election on the initiatives in Ohio. On the first of the initiatives, the results of the polls were exactly in line with the outcome of the election. However, on the election reform issues, the votes came up wildly different.

And remember, Ohio is the state where the CEO of Diebold promised to help Ohio “deliver its electoral votes to the president” in 2004.

Thanks to Laura for the pointer.

Weird.

July 13th is National “Computer Ate My Vote” Day. If you live in an area that uses electronic voting machines that do not leave a voter-verifiable paper trail, you need to get out and tell your officials that this is not acceptable in a free and democratic society.

Thanks to Cory and others for pointing this out.

VoteHere, a company based near my home, has made its secure voting code downloadable so that independent parties can verify the security of the algorithms.

I walked through their online demo at the above link, and the process they have set up seems very straighforward, and verifiable. I’m sure that people will be banging on the source to find holes in it. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Cory reports that Verisign, which recently directed every .com and .net URL typo to their own advertising site, is now getting to create key components of an electronic voting system.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

Update: fixed link.