John, I like this part of HR 811:

The voting system shall require the use of or produce an individual voter-verified paper ballot of the voter's vote that shall be created by or made available for inspection and verification by the voter before the voter's vote is cast and counted. For purposes of this clause, examples of such a ballot include a paper ballot marked by the voter for the purpose of being counted by hand or read by an optical scanner or other similar device, a paper ballot prepared by the voter to be mailed to an election official (whether from a domestic or overseas location), a paper ballot created through the use of a ballot marking device or system, or a paper ballot produced by a touch screen or other electronic voting machine, so long as in each case the voter is permitted to verify the ballot in a paper form in accordance with this subparagraph.

(link to HTML HR 811).

#1: Dredd, that clause sounds great on paper. However, the security provided by several of its options is illusory.

Let's consider just the DRE receipts, which the Holt bill calls "ballots": Many or most voters do not verify their DRE receipts. (References given below.)

Hackers can use this fact to their advantage.

If a receipt gets "misprinted," some voters will overlook the error, others will blame themselves. Even if a machine becomes suspect, its earlier errors can't be culled.

And then there's the fact that printers might for some reason malfunction more often in poorer districts than in wealthier ones. This, of course, would hinder validation of those machine counts.

These errors and others can be designed to appear accidental and to leave no evidence to the contrary. Professional hackers don't leave digital "fingerprints."

Here are some studies that show the insecurity of DRE receipts:

1) 47% of the voters in one Nevada election did not examine their DRE receipts.

http://www.lombardoconsu...up.com/nvvotersurvey.pdf

(File is no longer available at the original site. A copy is posted at http://e-grapevine.org/nvvotersurvey.pdf )

2) Participants in one study were asked if their DRE receipts contained errors.

60% of the subjects admitted that they did not know.

--From "An Active Approach to Voting Verification." A Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

http://vote.caltech.edu/...cuments/wps/vtp_wp28.pdf

3) "ESI researchers found that nearly 10 percent of VVPAT ballots [aka 'DRE receipts'] sampled were in some way compromised, damaged or otherwise uncountable, an alarmingly high proportion for a state that requires that paper be used as the ballot of record in the event of a recount."

--From Dan Seligson's report on the ESI study of the Ohio 2006 Primary.
http://tinyurl.com/zhlor