I subscribe to "What's New", a weekly electronic newsletter from the American Physical Society. I'm sure Bob Park won't mind my sharing one of the tidbits in today's newsletter, about electronic voting:

The Florida fiasco in the 2000 election sent officials across the country scurrying to modernize voting in their jurisdictions. Touch-screen electronic voting machines suddenly became a hot technology. They are fast and convenient, but are they reliable, tamper-proof and free of programing errors? There is absolutely no way of knowing! The machine code is a proprietary secret of the company that supplies them. This puts vote counting under the full control of a private company, with no independent checks or audits. Such machines are a serious threat to democracy, yet few people are even aware that there is a controversy. Touch- screen machines that print paper ballots would do, so long as the voter can check the ballot, which would go in a secure box to be available for manual counting. Opposition to paperless electronic voting machines is being organized by David Dill, a computer science prof at Stanford. He is seeking signatures of technologists, on a statement to warn the public of this threat to the integrity of the voting process.

This is something I haven't thought about much, but the idea of proprietary code determining the outcome of elections disturbs me. Any thoughts?