Touchdown

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighs in on computerized voting and manipulation of elections.

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent.

Gumbel's complete - and frankly chilling - account was in the LA City Beat and can be found here with a shorter version from the Independent for June 27 here.

By the way, this was not Gumbel's first venture into the issue; an earlier article of his about the issue of electronic voting, from last October, can be found here.