Mock The Vote
Andrew Gumbel exposes the gaping flaws in computer voting machines:

For the past few months, an increasingly loud chorus of leading computer scientists has warned about the dangers of touchscreen voting machines. Mounting evidence from elections across the country, including Californiaís recall election, indicates that the machines are prone to software bugs and breakdowns, extremely easy to tamper with, and impossible to verify because of strict trade-secrecy agreements by which the equipment is sold to county elections officials.

The first all-touchscreen election in the country, in Georgia last November, was marked by huge, unexplained last-minute swings that resulted in the surprise elections of Republican governor Sonny Perdue and Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The results raised significant concerns about the reliability of the machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, particularly since they had been ìpatchedî at the last minute following a major software breakdown. The patches, which amounted to a complete reprogramming, were never tested. Then, in January, the source code apparently used in Georgia suddenly popped up on an open-access Internet site ñ a big security no-no that was followed by the discovery of hundreds of security flaws by computer security experts who conducted two separate studies of the code for Johns Hopkins University and for the state of Maryland.

Worse, there were concerns that the companies making the machines were themselves politically engaged. Diebold CEO Walden OíDell told fellow Republicans (he is a major fundraiser for Bush 2004) he was ìcommitted to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.î

Touchscreens made by the three leading U.S. manufacturers (used by about 10 percent of California voters on October 7) are not currently configured to print out receipts of individual voting choices, so there is no separate paper trail to follow in case of controversy, and no possibility of conducting recounts. What is in the machine is in the machine ñ whether it is right, wrong, incorrectly processed, or subject to malicious interference.

Critics also have concerns about other uses of computers, especially in the tabulation of votes, irrespective of how they were actually cast. Again, it is a matter of properly functioning software and data security. That might not sound like such a stretch in this digital age, but the record of recent elections around the country suggests there are plenty of anomalies arising from computer tabulation that we need to worry about. Last Novemberís mid-terms produced one election in Texas where the computers declared a landslide victory to a candidate subsequently found, after a hand recount, to have lost. In another Texas county, three candidates for local office all won exactly 18,181 votes ñ a bizarre coincidence that was never investigated further. And in Alabama, the close race for governor turned on the last-minute, highly suspect cancellation of 7,000 votes in a rural county, where the discrepancy was blamed on a computer-tabulation error.

This isn't to say, with any certainty, that your vote won't count. It still might -- maybe even two or three times!

UPDATE: Here's Andrew's original exhaustive Independent/UK piece on the topic, republished on Common Dreams.