This just in from our friends at the EFF:

We need your help. California voters who are worried about electronic voting machines have an option to vote on paper this year. We worked very hard to get this from the Secretary of State and it was a major victory — he was sued over it and won in federal court.
Now we’ve learned that several of the larger counties (including Alameda, Santa Clara and Riverside) have instructed their pollworkers that they cannot tell voters about this choice. They must steer voters to the insecure machines and can only offer paper if a voter affirmatively chooses it.
Needless to say, this is outrageous. To try to raise voter awareness of the choice (and hopefully shame the registrars of voters to change their minds), we’ve thrown together a website:

http://www.paperorplastic2004.org
Please take a look and send the link on to your friends, family and other voters in the 11 affected counties (the list is on the website). We have very little time to get the word out, and I’m hoping that we can spread this far and wide and hopefully even provoke a little media coverage as well.

Hack the Vote
By Paul Krugman for the NY Times.

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell — who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail…
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.

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Someone sent me this interesting thread about the Department of Defense’s SERVE program. I’m still digesting this myself, but it seemed worthy of passing on to you.

When you recall that military absentee ballots were a critical factor in the Florida election of 2000, the scrutiny the SERVE project should attract a great deal of attention. But it has been running well below the radar since it was announced on June 2nd and and, as Slashdot pointed out, it will be a Microsoft Windows-only election.
In addition to military stationed overseas, citizens of Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah and Washington will be able to vote using SERVE. All the voters need to do is submit a form and they’ll be registered.
The troubling aspect of the SERVE program is that it appears to have no security features that will allow voters to check their votes were correctly recorded. The privacy statement on the SERVE site suggests that changing information is illegal and that connections will be monitored, but the ability for citizens to have oversight on the process is entirely absent. Say what you will, but hanging chads were important because they constituted a physical record. A vote intercepted and changed on the Internet or changed later by corrupt officials, which the 2000 election demonstrated is a potential factor in presidential elections.

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