Ohio Secretary or State Jennifer Brunner announced yesterday that paper ballots must be provided on request.

Poll workers won’t be told to offer the option to voters but must provide a ballot if requested to help “avoid any loss of confidence by voters that their ballot has been accurately cast or recorded,” a directive from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said. The paper ballots would be counted by optical scanners at county elections boards.

The Ohio ACLU is against having paper ballots available in the primary, claiming that not having scanners at the local polling locations is against state and federal laws mandating that voters have to know if they made a mistake such as casting too many or too few votes when filling out the ballot.

But Brunner said after consulting with the attorney general’s office, she thinks the ACLU is “flat wrong” and that voters will be adequately educated to avoid unintended over-votes and under-votes — problems that plagued the punch-card voting system that the electronic machines replaced.
Even so, Brunner told The Dispatch that said she is re- thinking her previous recommendation that no ballots be counted in the precincts, after activists argued that would eliminate a way to verify whether the final results are accurate.

The option for having paper ballots is in response to feedback in response the report issued last month by Brunner’s office revealing several critical vulnerabilities in currently available electronic voting systems. Brunner has also recommended that Ohio move to all paper ballots for the November election and has asked that the state legislature Gov. Strickland approve and fund the change.
The executive report is long but very educational and well worth reading, especially the recommendations. The full details are also online as well. California also recently released their own extensive reviews some of which were leveraged for the Ohio study. I’ve only skimmed portions of it so far, but by all reports, it is also very enlightening.
Speaking of California, the Secretary of State Bowen, has announced some very impressive new requirements for the use of electronic voting. This is great stuff, that helps deal with the issues of existing machines while still allowing the democratic process to move forward. Hopefully other states will follow suit.

Adam Frucci at Gizmodo is calling for action, “Putting Our Money Where Our Mouths Are: Boycott the RIAA in March.”

I don’t disagree with him on the basics. I believe that consumer revolt is a misunderstood power. If you don’t believe me, I can prove it with one TLA: DAT. If your response to that is, “Huh?” then you’ve proved me right. The details of that are another essay, however.

However, there’s more to it than that. Boycotts are not as effective as purchase-shifting. If you just don’t buy any CDs, then one line in an accountant’s ledger will go down. The conclusion they’re going draw is that this means they have to hold tighter to what they have. There are no atheists in foxholes, but there are clinchpoops, and they clinch their poop tighter.

Subscribing to eMusic is good idea. If you haven’t, do so. If you regularly buy music, you will find enough things on eMusic that the monthly fee will save you a penny.

Better, go to CDBaby, Yep Roc, Compadre, and others. Even better, many,many small artists sell their music from their own web sites, often through a small label. As nice as eMusic is, relatively little of the money you give them will get in the hands of the musicians, and buying CDs as close as possible to the musicians themselves is the best way to get them what they deserve. Don’t wait for Friday, do it now.

Ed Felten points out that “NIST Recommends Decertifying Paperless Voting Machines:”

In an important development in e-voting policy, NIST has issued a report recommending that the next-generation federal voting-machine standards be written to prevent (re-)certification of today’s paperless e-voting systems. … The new report is notable for its direct tone and unequivocal recommendation against unverifiable paperless voting systems, and for being a recommendation of NIST itself and not just of the report’s individual authors.

…

Years from now, when we look back on the recent DRE fad with what-were-we-thinking hindsight, we’ll see this NIST report as a turning point.

Photo: suffragettes, of course. At anther turning point.

At first I thought that the stories around Sequoia Voting Systems and Smartmatic having connections to Hugo Chavez were silly. I still do think that, but I also think that they’re coming out for an important reason: we have lost trust in the machinery of voting, and that is a criminal shame.

The right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted is fundamental to how and why we accept our government, even when it makes colossal mistakes. This is an ideal which people around the world recognize and aspire to. The imprint of legitimacy which an election confers on a leader is important enough that even the Soviets faked elections so they could claim that mantle.

If we had voting systems that were trustworthy, transparent and understood by those operating them, then we could buy our voting machines from Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not have to worry a lot about it. We do not, and cannot. We have transitioned from paper ballots and their understood problems into a brave new world of computerized and untrustworthy voting systems, and we are poorer for it.

I propose we call this the Hugo Chavez test, and see how all new voting technology fares under the test. We could realistically consider buying paper ballots, punch cards, or other verifiable voting technologies from the Chavez government, and be reasonably confident in our ability to test them and be sure we were getting what we specified. (I’m confident someone will point out an exceptionally clever trick, so read the comments.) I’m also confident that we can’t say the same of any computerized system on the market today. Our ability to audit them is simply too lacking, and the skills to do so too rare.

The photo is Malcom X, because we sometimes forget that within living memory, not all Americans had a right to vote. We forget that that right was important enough for Malcom X to declare 1964 might be be the “year of the ballot or the bullet.” That the ballot is so powerful that men ready to commit acts of violence could be placated by giving them the right to vote. It’s an important right, and the value of trust that our votes are counted accurately and securely is nearly incalculable.

Well, not intentionally.
Seems that multiple versions of source code (including the one used to run the 2004 primaries in Maryland) were delivered anonymously to a former legislator who has been critical of Diebold.
Note that this is not the same source examined by Avi Rubin, et. al., and found wanting from a security perspective.
The Baltimore Sun has more.