George,

The to-and-fro over the safety and security of voting machines has been interesting, even though the arguers and arguments are a bit long-winded. If I may throw in a bit more pithy two cents of my own…..

Rick Sincere is right on in his defense of our voting systems for two major reasons that are continually overlooked and ignored by some of the voting machine naysayers:
(1) You can't hack in to something that has no means of electronic communication. You can't hack in to a typewriter unless you have the typewriter in your lap. As Sincere says, electoral boards with brains would never adopt any of the systems whereby results are directly communicated from machine to some central location. We get results election night by telephone from an election official, and that's the way it should stay.
(2) To "fix" a system, you've got to bribe a whole bunch of people along the machine "chain" and count on all of them keeping their mouths shut. In our day and age, it's hard to count on anyone keeping his/her mouth shut - even Deep Throat.

I hope Sincere keeps calling it like it is.

Jim Heilman (electronic mail, August 25, 2005)