This fall, 30 percent of us will cast our votes by touching a screen on a computerized voting machines. The good news is, these machines don't have any of the problems of paper ballots. The bad news is, they may have much worse problems all their own. [California] Secretary of State Kevin Shelley: There was a wholesale breakdown in the election last March in...San Diego. Untold thousands of individuals were turned away and denied their right to vote because the voting equipment couldn't start." So many of the machines malfunctioned or ran unapproved software that Shelley took the extraordinary step of decertifying them. Then there's the software worry. Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, spent two weeks analyzing the software from the world's biggest voting-machine company, Diebold Election Systems, which has over 50 percent of the market. "We found all kinds of problems in the code," he said. "Upon looking at the source code for Diebold, it was pretty clear that this was a real amateur job. The concern I have is that those machines will be programmed from the start to favor one candidate over another," says Rubin. A Diebold plot to rig the elections? Where did that idea come from? The rumors began with this letter from Diebold's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." But Rubin says he is not accusing Diebold of rigging elections. "I'm just saying that they could do it and that we shouldn't allow our elections to be under control of vendors when there are ways of designing voting machines such that the vendors don't have the control of them."

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