There's a new article over at TomPaine.Com regarding the growing controversy over paperless e-voting machines. It looks like the issue is finally getting mainstream media attention.
The article is by Henry Norr, former technology columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here are a couple of grafs:
"Congressman Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a former Princeton University physicist, last year filed a bill that would amend the Help America Vote Act--the 2002 legislation that provides funding for new voting equipment--to require a voter-verified paper record for the 2004 elections. That bill, H.R. 2239, now has 94 co-sponsors, including three Republicans. In December, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) filed a similar bill in the Senate (S.1980), and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced her attention to do likewise, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced a separate bill that would add a general voter-verification requirement, but not require that it take the form of a paper record--opening the door, according to Dill and other critics, for technological pseudo-fixes that add no real guarantee of the systems' integrity.
(Sigh. Leave it to Hillary to try to fashion a "compromise" on something as basic as voting! If more heat gets turned on this subject, look for the Rethugs to move from outright opposition to embrace the Clinton "compromise" so they can claim they've "solved" the problem.)
"The prospects for these bills are of course uncertain. The opposition -- led by the voting-equipment manufacturers, but supported by many state and local election officials who don't want to face the extra hassle and expense inevitably associated with a paper trail, as well as by some disability-rights activists and, surprisingly, the League of Women Voters -- will surely be formidable, and although the Bush administration has yet to take a public stand on the issue, it would be a major surprise in the wake of the Florida fiasco if the Republican majority were to support a paper-trail requirement."
(The League of Women Voters opposes Rush Holt's bill? Et tu, Brute?)