That we are getting electronic voting machines that don't have verifiable audit trails is disheartening. As someone who is responsible for managing electronic data, I'm dumbfounded. My rule is that if the document is critical, keep a paper copy. Silly me, I still think that voting falls into the critical category.

The Diebold machines being rolled out across the country not only don't have an audit trail, they are based on a database that is not designed to be secure. The MS Access database, used by Diebold, is designed to facillitate everyday data manipulation needs. It does a pretty good job at that. However, it is very easy to crack into.

Recent discoveries indicate that in some important elections, the Diebold databases were manipulated to affect the outcome of the races. The raw material for these allegations is a bunch of memos downloaded from an open Diebold ftp site. Diebold is now using copyright law to squelch the disemination of the memos.

There are a number of student sites which carry the memos, spearheaded by the why-war site at Swathmore. Here's a link to their page about the memos.