"State governments in Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee and New Mexico have decided to replace their touch-screen electronic machines. While some states have completed the switch, others won't finish replacing the machines until 2010. Nationwide, the federal government spent $1.2 billion on new voting machines between 2003 and 2007.

"Optical scanning equipment is becoming the preferred replacement because, unlike touch-screens, it preserves each voter's original paper ballot in the event of a recount.

"Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is seeking to recover millions of dollars her state spent on the touch-screen machines and is urging the state legislature to require optical scanners statewide instead.

"In a lawsuit, Brunner charged on Aug. 6 that touch-screen machines made by the former Diebold Election Systems and bought by 11 Ohio counties "produce computer stoppages" or delays and are vulnerable to "hacking, tampering and other attacks." In all, 44 Ohio counties spent $83 million in 2006 on Diebold's touch screens.

"In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), creating minimum election standards and allotting nearly $3 billion to states to upgrade voting equipment,voter registration databases and otherwise to improve election administration.

"Facing deadlines to spend their so-called HAVA money, counties across the country began ordering new machines. Iowa, for example, spent $18.7 million on new machines in 2006 and exhausted its allotment of HAVA money.

"Meantime, computer scientists at several universities, some of whom had been hired to test voting machines for the states of California, Ohio, Connecticut and New York, reported finding security and performance flaws in virtually every system, spurring the push for a paper audit trail.

"Earlier this year, Iowa's legislature joined others in reversing course, voting to use millions of dollars in state money to replace touch-screen machines in 78 of the state's 99 counties, Iowa Secretary of State Michael Mauro said. He said Democrats and Republicans alike "overwhelmingly want a paper trail to reconstruct the election," if needed.

"Despite such shifts, voters in nearly 32 percent of the nation's precincts will rely solely on touch-screens this year, said Pamela Smith, the president of the California-based watchdog group Verified Voting.

"That includes most voters in states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana and Virginia, said Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit group Voter Action, who called the machines "scandalously flawed . . . untrustworthy."

Yet, some states and counties are still deliberately using touch screen machines that have been proven to be unsecure and terribly flawed...not counting, undercounting, and overcounting votes and votes cast for one candidate going to another.

Until flawed touch screen machines are removed from the voting process, all voting should be done by paper ballots which are countable.

The HAVA bill was not a well intentioned mistake but an intentional method for the then Republican controlled Congress to control the voting process in favor of Republcian candidates and help Karl Rove and his crew with their goal of Republican Party domination of this country for decades to come.  Using HAVA, the Republican majority in Congress was able to put billions of dollars  in the pockets of primarily Republican owned touch screen companies like Diebold and ES&S.  

Senator Chuch Hagel, (R-NE) was the chairman of ES&S whose machines counted 80% of his winning votes in the 1996 and 2002 elections, a fact not made known until 2003 when Hagel finally admitted to ownership in the company.  Of course Diebold was involved in a scandal with its former CEO, Wally O'Dell, who, while selling his touch screen machines to the state of Ohio in 2003, infamously proclaimed that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush, which he did. 

This touch screen voting machine crime has been going on for more than half a decade and still many states are using machines bought during the HAVA debacle, machines which can be easily hacked, can mis-record or fail to record votes accurately, often deliberately, without any effective recount possible. 

John Bonifaz's warning bears repeating especially since the voting machine software is proprietary and not allowed to be checked by the voters or their representatives.   "But the overall push on this is to reclaim public control of public elections and the dangers associated with outsourcing of our elections to private companies for certain key election functions."