Please read this article and I'd also like your postition on going to a strictly all paper, hand counted voting solution.

There are many effective all paper, hand counted solutions that are used in many countries and many counties in the US.

This seem the most effective way to vote and count the votes.

What do you think?

Btw, I think you should send this article to your local county official, so they know that their machines are "tested" without Federal oversight.

Lax controls over e-voting testing labs

ELECTION OFFICIALS RELY ON PRIVATE FIRMS

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley had a simple question: Had a new electronic voting machine been approved by an independent testing lab?

State law requires such approval before the device could be used by California voters. It guaranteed the machines counted votes accurately and would work reliably during an election. As the state's top election official, Shelley figured he could get a quick answer.

He figured wrong.

Wyle Laboratories of El Segundo refused to discuss the status of its testing of the AccuVote-TSx machine made by its client, Diebold Election Systems. The information was proprietary, Wyle said, and could be revealed only to Diebold.

And so the secretary of state was introduced to the looking-glass world of voting-machine regulation. Over the years, repeated references to ``federal testing'' by election officials have given the impression that the government oversees the certification of touch-screen voting systems. While there are guidelines for the machines, no federal agency has legal authority to enforce them.

Instead, state officials rely on what amounts to a privately operated testing system -- a small group of for-profit companies overseen by a private elections group to ensure the integrity of elections increasingly dependent on electronic voting machines.

No official oversight

Neither the testing procedures nor the testing results are considered to be public information, and these testing laboratories have not traditionally been subject to direct oversight by election officials. For years, the testing system was managed by a private center that also accepted donations from voting-equipment manufacturers.

Read more at Mercury News.