Good news:

Franklin County and all other Ohio counties that use touch-screen voting systems must provide a paper ballot to any voter who asks for one in the March 4 primary, the state's chief elections officer has ordered.
Poll workers won't be told to offer the option to voters but must provide a ballot if requested to help "avoid any loss of confidence by voters that their ballot has been accurately cast or recorded," a directive from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said. The paper ballots would be counted by optical scanners at county elections boards.

And it wouldn't be me if I didn't provide some balance: Read more…

So while everyone is learning about how Republicans manufactured a "crisis" in vote fraud (and were blatantly racist about it, I will add), can we please pay attention to a state-appointed panel of scientists on the real problems with how we vote? Anyone? Bueller?

One computer scientist who has closely reviewed the team's findings warned via email, "The FSU report revealed a serious security vulnerability in the iVotronic: it is vulnerable to viruses that could be introduced by a single outsider and that could spread throughout a county. This means that a single outsider in a county that uses the iVotronic Firmware version 8 could potentially steal all the votes in that county, without being detected." Read more…

Keep in mind: it's not just the votes "counted" by these machines, it's often the voter rolls of eligible voters as well. Keep an eye on Brad's place over the next few days. He's doing Pulitzer level work of late, for all our SCLM takes note. Some choice selections:

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Christ. At least the Times and ABC picked this up, for once. Sid said yesterday, when asked by a particularly long winded activist on the topic, paper is the only way. Let's all come to our senses and admit that we need real reform, yesterday. If the elections don't come out the way all the polls are saying they will, no one can claim they weren't warned:

Another stunning security breach has been exposed in our nation's electoral system, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as the online voter registration database — containing the personal information of some 1.5 million voters in Chicago — has been found to be vulnerable to both downloading and hacking.

The flawed electronic database which allowed the retrieval and modification of personal voter information — including social security numbers and birthdates of Chicago voters — was discovered recently by members of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP), a non-partisan group of Election Integrity advocates.

IBIP members say they were not only able to get full editing access to the online database, they also found they could modify the records for registered voters, setting them to inactive and otherwise changing addresses and other key information fields.
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