After the disastrous 2000 Presidential election, Congress passed and W signed the grossly-misnamed Help America Vote Act, which resulted in a failed 8-year experiment with unauditable DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines. They have an impressively awful record in use, due to inherent problems with the concept and incompetent engineering and testing by the industry, sufficient to suggest, but not prove, intentional voting fraud. California's Secretary of State has decertified many DREs for these and other reasons.

What to do, then?

Proposals include

• Go back to paper ballots, but use optical scanning, rather than pre-punched cards.

• Pro: No hanging or dimpled chads.
• Con: No audit trail. Easy to add, remove, or replace ballots.
  

• Fix the DREs.
• Pro: They would work as intended.
• Con: They would not work as required, since they would still be unauditable.
  
• Mandate VVPAT (Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) on electronic voting systems.
• Pro: An audit trail exists.
  
• Con: It is feeble, taking no advantage of computer security capabilities.
  
• Have the electronic systems print a paper ballot.
• Pro: Auditable, particularly if the system prints security checksums that can be verified independently.
  
• Con: The author of this page has not heard any serious objection.
  
• Develop Free/Open Source Software voting systems incorporating audit and security capabilities.

• Pro: The public will own all rights to the software through GPL license. Any programmer can read the source code and check how it works. Anyone, programmer or not, can test the software, using a published test suite or tests of their own devising. No hanky-panky with illegal proprietary software updates. Runs on standard computer hardware, not expensive proprietary equipment. Auditable and secure.
  
• Con: Open Source? What's that? Some kind of Communist conspiracy?
  

Ideas not currently on the table include

• Using competently engineered punch card technology that does not produce hanging or dimpled chads. IBM card punches are engineered to punch incorrectly at a lower rate than once in a billion times, but so far it has been impossible to discuss this fact.
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Motivation for fraud alleged

According to Marc Crispin Miller, a further problem may be that many founders and owners of major voting machine companies are members of the Christian Religious Right, further suggesting, but by no means proving, intentional electoral crimes. He claims (but does not provide adequate supporting evidence) that the heads of the principal voting equipment companies are Evangelicals and Theocrats.

• Diebold and ES&S were both begun by Bob and Todd Urosevich, two allegedly ardent Oklahoma theocrats. (No data)
  
• Howard Ahmanson, a Board Member of the Dominionist/Christian Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation, provided seed financing for the precursor of the first ES&S voting machine. (True)
  Triad, which makes the central vote tabulators used in Ohio in 2004, is owned by the Rapp family.
  
• SmartTech, the company that allegedly helped Bush/Cheney steal that state, is owned by evangelical Jeff Averbeck. (No data)
  
• his associate Mike Connell, owner of GovTech Solutions, which also allegedly helped to steal Ohio, among other races, was allegedly motivated to such work by his desire "to save the babies," according to controversial critic Stephen Spoonamore. (Yes, Spoonamore says so. No other data.)