I get worked up over election issues. I'm all about the voter-verified paper trails and the open-source voting software. The race for California Secretary of State is the most important contest to me this year -- I extol the virtues of Debra Bowen every chance I get (vote for her, by the way).
But Phil Keisling spun me around in his perspective-altering book review of Aviel Rubin's Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting. Rubin is one of the top researchers of voting machine security. Ed Felten writes about him a lot.
Keisling is the former Secretary of State of Oregon. He basically labels voting-machine concerns as paranoia, which isn't be endearing at all until he follows it up with a good alternative. The only way for Oregonians to vote is by mail, he says, and other states should follow this lead. It eliminates many of the security concerns and, more importantly, ameliorates the social concerns by raising voter turnout.
I'd known about Oregon's vote-by-mail law before, but its importance relative to other voting issues had never been made clear. I still think election issues should be a top domestic priority, and Diebold machines should be relegated to elections for bowling leagues and middle-school class officers, but vote-by-mail is now the election policy that occupies my daydreams.
(He does spend a leettle too much time equating folks like me, who worry that closed-source, for-profit voting machines are toolboxes for centralized election fraud, with folks who gin up fears about illegal immigrants in order to pass stifling voter ID laws. The equation makes sense on a certain level: there's no evidence that either nightmare scenario has come to pass. But my team's scenario is both more frightening and more likely. Closed voting machines make it easy to commit a lot of fraud with a little effort, which in turn boosts incentives to try something, whereas, Keisling points out, illegal immigrants are unlikely to go through all the trouble of forging documents just so they can vote.)
Anyway, it's a really good piece.