Gee, some good news two days in a row - what is the world coming to?

In a toughly-worded slam of their technology and their corporate practices, California secretary of state Kevin Shelley has

banned the use of more than 14,000 electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc. in the November election because of security and reliability concerns.... He also declared 28,000 other touch-screen voting machines in the state conditionally "decertified" until steps are taken to upgrade their security.

Mr. Shelley said that he was recommending that the state's attorney general look into possible civil and criminal charges against Diebold because of what he called "fraudulent actions by Diebold"

and called the company's behavior, which included installing uncertified systems in four counties and then lying about it, "despicable" and "deceitful."

There have been two main and one (by comparison) minor complaints against touch-screen voting: They can be hacked, the lack of a paper trail makes a recount impossible, and if they break down, few election officials have the training to get them working again; indeed, the companies making the machines usually try to keep such information to themselves.

In addition, their abysmally bad performance in California and Florida didn't help their reputations.

As a result, they have become more and more controversial. While California has gone further than other states which initially adopted the technology, there is growing concern, even a backlash against the machines.

A voters group in Maryland, the Campaign for Verifiable Voting, filed suit against the Maryland Board of Elections last week to block the use of the state's 16,000 touch-screen machines until paper-based verification systems that display each vote can be added to them.

Federal lawmakers, including Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, have called for voter-verified paper trails as well.

Two excellent resources on this are at VerifiedVoting.org and BlackBoxVoting.org. The latter site is run by Bev Harris, who almost single-handedly pushed this issue into the national consciousness.

Update: BlackBoxVoting reports that Ireland, Venezuela, and the Philippines are dumping touch-screen voting.