A few years ago PC World's then-editor Harry McCracken had me look under the hood of the most popular voting machines. It came down to this: People trust ink-on-paper records more than anything stored in a computer. They only suspect tampering when they lose. Did you notice the lack of mainstream media stories about voting machine risks in 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress? There's your liberal media bias, right there. It's not that editors and producers killed stories questioning the vote, it's that they forgot to assign them after their side won. Today, Kim Zetter at Wired.com is the only reporter cranking out the e-voting fail. Ohio has some ESS iVotronics that will only vote for Nader. God help us all.

"If we can find out who did it, we will do what we can to prosecute the individual. This is very serious." That's what a spokesman for George Mason University told the Washington Post about an email sent from the provost's personal account to 35,000 students, staff and faculty this morning. The email simply stated that today's election had been moved to tomorrow. I would say "nice try," except this doesn't even qualify as a nice try.

Princeton professor Andrew Appel performed a source-code analysis of Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Advantage e-voting machines, and wrote up a report on their security and accuracy. Now, he says, a New Jersey Superior Court judge has ordered him not to release his report or talk about it. Appel blogs that "the attorney for Sequoia grossly mischaracterized our report," but he won't spell out how. Well, at least we know it wasn't good news. (Photo by Orcmid)

As much as I hate to agree with Ann Coulter on anything, the outrage, outrage over the unreliability of electronic voting machines seems to have stopped as soon as the Dems won a Congressional majority two years ago. Diebold, the company most accused of shipping buggy and/or rigged machines, renamed its subsidiary Premier last summer and is still shipping units, but only a few relentless bloggers are still claiming e-fraud in the booths. My take: If the machines were that hackable by savvy IT workers, Ron "the new Linux" Paul would be doing a lot better.

From an AP report: "About 20 folks at a Chicago precinct were given styluses designed for touch-screen machines instead of ink pens. When voters complained the devices made no marks on their paper ballots, a ballot judge told them the markers were full of invisible ink."