There are so many articles out right now regarding electronic voting and the upcoming election that I thought it might be helpful to provide links and summaries to these works:

Talk of the Nation, September 22, 2006: As the election season begins in earnest, guests discuss the technology of voting machines. How can designers improve security, reliability, and usability?

The New York Times, September 24, 2006: One brand of machine leads in market share by a sizable margin: the AccuVote, made by Diebold Election Systems. Two weeks ago, however, Diebold suffered one of the worst kinds of public embarrassment for a company that began in 1859 by making safes and vaults. Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, and his student collaborators conducted a demonstration with an AccuVote TS and noticed that the key to the machine’s memory card slot appeared to be similar to one that a staff member had at home.

The Washington Post, September 24, 2006: The widely publicized failure in Prince George’s County to electronically transmit results from many polls after the Sept. 12 primary was compounded by a host of other errors, including failure to swiftly collect the data cards on which some votes are recorded and to properly secure voting machines. The last of the cards were not retrieved and counted until nine days after the balloting — several from inside electronic voting machines from a Landover precinct where Robert J. McGinley, the county elections board’s attorney, said security procedures were “just blatantly not followed.”

The Washington Post, September 22, 2006: Faced with intense opposition to his proposal to switch from electronic voting machines to paper ballots, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) yesterday urged voters to stay away from polling places during the November general election and instead cast paper absentee ballots….The plan was denounced by some Democrats who said it was another attempt by the governor, who is up for reelection, to boost his candidacy by suppressing voter turnout and sowing doubts about the state’s electronic voting system.