Or this

Updated Touchscreen computer voting devices continue to have glaring problems and the doubts about them, including the possibility that they can be hacked, continue to grow. In response, the Brennan Center has issued a list of recommendations for maintaining security of the machines. The thing is, if the devices themselves are flawed, increasing their security won't help.

Tallahassee, FL (AP, June 12) - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug. ...

The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.

What that means, in short, is that when the machine is audited after the election there's no way to be sure if the totals it reported are accurate or not.

By the way, this also puts a possibly different light on Ed Kast's act of "good conscience." He had testified on May 17 that he had only heard of the problem through the media a few days earlier. His "abrupt" resignation came not long after Rep. Robert Wexler, charging Kast and Secretary of State Glenda Hood had known about the bug at least since March,

asked state Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head of the state elections division lied under oath when he denied knowing of the computer problem before reading about it in the media. A spokeswoman for Crist said he was reviewing the request.

Hood, for her part, passed the buck and the blame to Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan for the delay, who apparently learned of the problem in June 2003.

Previous posts on the touching saga of touchscreen voting were on December 11, December 18, December 20, December 31, January 19, January 24, February 1, February 16, March 18, and May 3.

Footnote one: Company and state officials said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Sounds like a kludge to me.

Footnote two: Rep. Rush Holt (D, NJ-12) introduced a bill to require all computer touchscreen voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper receipt. The bill is H.R. 2239. On February 10, Buzzflash had an interview with him.

Updated to include these sources of information:
- BlackboxVoting features the work of Bev Harris, who has probably done more than any other single individual to raise awareness of the issue of computerized voting.
- VerifiedVoting advocates for "Voter Verified Paper Ballots" in all elections and keeps track of relevant news. It also has a 51-page summary of election problems with electronic voting dating from 2002 up to March of this year. It's in .pdf format here.
- VoteFraud no longer seems to be updated (it's last "breaking news" was last October) but does have a lot of background including how concerns were raised years before they became more generally known.