Some people have been sounding the alarm about the problems with electronic voting machines with no audit trail for years now. The story at AlterNet: Election 2004: Exit Polls Right, Tallies Wrong? goes into examples of very strange problems and results from these machines. It also has links to many of the sources referenced in the story. One thing of particular importance to watch out for is the after-the-fact adjustment of exit polling predictions to bring them in line with the voting machine results.

The hot story in the blogosphere is that the 'erroneous' exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all -- it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does – people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.