Today there is an unannounced Senate Committee hearing on e-voting.

The witness list includes: (links are to related articles on each)

• James C. Dickson -- Over 14 million voters with disabilities cast their vote in the 2000 presidential election. This was an increase of more than 2.7 million from the 1996 election. Unfortunately, more than 21 million voting aged people with disabilities did not cast a ballot.
• Prof. David L. Dill == "Computer scientists, as well as voters, are upset by paper-less direct recording electronic voting systems, because we know that even a beginning programmer can write code that displays votes one way on a screen, records them another way and tallies them yet another way," Dill said. "This can happen for a variety of reasons, including software and hardware errors, or ‘hacks’ installed into the voting machines."
• Ms. Conny McCormack -- "The voters love them. The surveys we’ve had, as well as other jurisdictions around the country, voters flock to them. They’re big print, easy to understand, easy to use," says Conny McCormack, who runs elections in Los Angeles County.
• Professor Ted Selker -- The aging machines' error rates--aggravated by their inability to clearly log the voter's intent (Florida's notorious "hanging chad" problem)--are so high that in 2000 the number of votes separating Bush and Gore was less than the margin of error in the count. But according to MIT professor Ted Selker, cochair of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, touch-screen replacements aren't faring better than paper-based systems.

The news media read blogs. You think they'll cover any of this? Not to worry, there's breaking coverage (on DailyKos) by DC Pol Sci, who apparently is in the room.

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