(Photo credit to Chris Gardner/Associated Press.  The tenuous, spindly construct of this just screamed voter machine problems to me — great shot.)

This evening on HDNet, Dan Rather will have a special report on the issues of electronic voting, voter fraud and disenfranchisement.  Obviously that’s an enormous set of possible topics, but the preview for the show looks intriguing — it’s centered around the problems with touch-screen voting — and I thought a number of our readers might be interested in this as well.

There have been diaries up at DKos (H/T to reader LS for this particular link) and BradBlog has been all over this, not surprisingly, but I wanted to be certain that folks here saw it as well.  Voting integrity is one of those issues that I don’t cover as much, mainly because the technical expertise involved in discussing the computerized whatsits is well beyond my low-tech challenged understanding of the issues.  So I mainly leave this discussion to the folks who have a real understanding of the mechanisms and the problems therewith.

But that doesn’t mean that the issue is not of great importance, and I try to educate myself on this whenever I find information that is useful in that regard.  There have been any number of articles and studies over the last few years on the problems involved and the issues of integrity of the votes and hacking potential.  As TBogg so eloquently said:

We can put cheese in a can, 20,000 songs on a device the size of a pack of cigarettes, and we can fake a moon landing on a soundstage, but we can’t make a voting machine work.

I guess we should be happy that Diebold doesn’t make airplanes…

Should be an interesting HDNet investigative report. I know I’ll be watching…

PS — I’ve added Tbogg’s hilarious faux moon landing rebuttal link into the post, because some moronic wingnut didn’t bother to click through the initial link and actually read the post and thought tbogg was serious.  Where do they find these incurious idiots to write for these wingnut welfare sites, anyway?