Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more....

CNN has another twist in the issue of touch-screen electronic voting devices.

Washington (AP) - A company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online.

VoteHere Inc. of Bellevue, Washington, confirmed Monday that U.S. authorities are investigating a break-in of its computers months ago, when someone roamed its internal computer network. The intruder accessed internal documents and may have copied sensitive software blueprints that the company planned eventually to disclose publicly.

The company, which claims it can identify the hacker, is treating this as an attempt to steal documents for the purpose of embarrassing them in the same way Diebold was embarrassed by the way its own internal statements demonstrated the problems with the technology.

But I suspect there may be something else going on here. What if it develops that the purpose wasn't to get documents but to show they could be gotten? That is, how can we trust these corporations to protect our votes when they can't even protect their own files?

Other posts on the topic are here, here, here, and here. And don't forget blackboxvoting.org, which has an interesting take on this story.