"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes."

I find the following list of facts rather ominous:

• On Oct 29, 2002, Congress passed Public Law 107-252, the jauntily-titled Help America Vote Act of 2002. This act provides $3.9 billion to the states for a number of purposes, including replacing punch card voting systems or lever voting systems (the machinery implicated in the "hanging chad" nonsense seen in the 2000 election in Florida) with more modern systems, including but not limited to electronic voting (e-voting) systems.
  
• The leading manufacturer of e-voting equipment is Diebold Election Systems, headquartered in Canton, Ohio. Walden O'Dell, chairman and CEO of Diebold, is listed as a 2004 Bush Pioneer, which means that he provided at least $100,000 to Bush's re-election campaign.
  
• August 2003. O'Dell sends out a fund-raising letter which includes the phrase "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Ohio is considered one of the key battlegrounds in the 2004 election, a swing state with 20 electoral votes.
  
• 4 May 2004: Ohio decides to go with e-voting.
  
• Elections and computer science experts have expressed deep doubts about the security of e-voting systems in general and Diebold's machines in particular. In particular, there is a growing demand for a paper trail to document votes.

If you find this sort of thing worrying, consider signing Democracy for America's petition, which asks Congress & the state election boards to require voter-verifiable machines & a paper trail.

P.S. The quotation in the subject header for this post is from .... Joseph Stalin.