If you care about American democracy ...

In case you hadn't heard, we're about to have a major election ... on electronic voting machines that are poorly designed and easily hacked, machines that will be setup and run by volunteer election officials who are probably not computer experts. This is not a partisan issue, election-day chaos is bad for everyone. Here are links to a couple of excellent articles on my favorite tech website, ArsTechnica.com, that lay out the potential dangers. Please pass this on.

Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm (short and scary)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html

As we move toward the November mid-terms, we're beginning to a more detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a nation in less than a week: two major new reports from independent research groups detail the myriad security breaches, and procedural and technical problems in the 2006 Ohio primaries; stories from early voting in Texas indicate that the paperless DREs in at least two counties may have a partisan bias; another major new report from the University of Connecticut details a whole raft of security vulnerabilities in Diebold's optical scan voting machines; finally, BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.
...
In sum, people will show up on November 7th at many precincts across America, they will select items on a touch-screen, a lucky few of them will see a paper record of their choices (correctly marked or not) scroll by under a glass, and they will return home having participated in a bit of high-tech political theater that may or may not amount to a bona fide election.

If you think that I overstate things just a bit here, then by all means, read on.

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How to steal an election by hacking the vote (long, but full of details on how flawed these machines are):
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

PDF version
http://arstechnica.com/etc/How_to_steal_an_election-ArsTechnica.pdf