Like many of you, I consider myself a computer professional and am thus amazed at the lack of regulation, testing, and process imposed on our electronic voting system here in America. It also seems to me that, as computer professionals who intimately understand the vulnerabilities of such systems, perhaps we are responsible to push American society to voting reforms.

Let's talk about voting machines. Here are a few topics that might seed some discussion:

* Why do we have such a decentralized process, in which local authorities have black-box control over the voting measures? I suspect the policy thinking may be, "better to have 10,000 people stealing an election -- independently -- from the bottom that one from the top."

* Is trading anonymity for better verification an option that makes sense to add to the process? (As it appears New Jersey is doing with email and fax ballots.) Does this open a slippery slope to some employers requiring that their employees submit a voting receipt?

* Are multiple-factor voting systems a realistic way forward. I.e., electronic systems that print out multiple receipts: one to take home and one to submit as a paper ballot for [proactive?] re-counting and checking the electronic system?