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I went to the polls in Maryland today and was offended three times in five minutes:

The voting machines were electronic-only touch-screen devices. No hinto of any type of paper trail or accountability. I am left to hope that my vote was correctly recorded and that it will be tabulated, because I don't see a person (or persons) responsible for chain of custody.
The "I Voted" sticker they slapped on me as I left was bi-lingual -- English and Spanish. Isn't the ability to speak English a requirement for the citizenship exam? If so, then why do election materials have to be bi-lingual?
I caught a glance at the Democrat primary sample ballot while I was waiting for Mrs. kevkrom to finish voting -- there are actually separate sections for delegates to the convention for male and female delegates! So much for affirmative action not meaning quotas...

Hi Andy here....

I am a researcher on the BBV problem. I am running for office in Washington state as a Democrat on this issue. But the issue I am running on is non partisan! I would lay down my life for every Americans right to vote. The systems being deployed across the nation right now, are error prone and have been soundly denounced by every major computer expert in the country.

Diebold's software was left on the internet. We have all the release notes and bug tracks available for public scrutiny. It has been examined tested and vetted and found to be unsafe for elections.

Today there were problems with the smart cards all over in Md, GA, and CA. Read this note, one of 15k leaked to Bev Harris it refers to the smart cards.

"Do not install the windows software that comes with the Spyrus reader. If you install it, then COM1 will be locked out by the driver, and downldr.exe won't work. My hope is that the Spyrus CD and instructions be removed from the box in McKinney before shipping so this confusion is avoided.

Note that distributing this software is extremely dangerous. Our smart card format has absolutely no security, so if someone were to get a copy of this software and a reader, they could stand at the ballot station and quietly burn new voter cards all day. Of course that's also the case with PollBook.exe, but a notebook computer is a little harder to smuggle into a polling place, and besides most of our staff has trouble setting up a poll book, let alone outsiders. The Card Manager (Spyrus) is actually simple to use. Anyway, I can see the cover of USA Today in my head. Consider everyone warned.

Good luck,

Ken"

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/smartcardmemo.html

We must all agree to

Paper Ballots not vapor Ballots

Andy