Thad recently blogged about a provision in Ohio’s election law that may allow someone to reconstruct someone’s vote by taking advantage of two data reporting features. First, Ohio county election returns can be sorted by the order in which the ballots were cast. Second, Ohio law allows access to the voting machine paper trails–including time stamps.

Thad recommends just turning off this feature.

Now wait a second, Dr. Hall! Don’t you know anyone who would love to take advantage of this reporting feature in order to track early voting? How about anyone who might like to relate patterns of under -and over-votes to the time the ballot was cast?

Sound like anyone familiar? And don’t you think said individual might not have realized that voting machine tapes would be very useful??

Thanks Thad … for NOTHING!