I received this message from MoveOn a day or two ago and signed the petition.

A couple of years ago, I volunteered to serve as a poll commissioner in my home precinct ~ shortly after Katrina, in time for the New Orleans mayoral election, for which the polls were going to be impossibly understaffed without an influx of new volunteers.

Louisiana had installed an entire new system of voting machines statewide not long before the flood. Each machine generates a printout of results. We commissioners are required to crank out a "zero proof" printout at the beginnnig of the day (to verify that no invalid votes had been "pre-entered"), and multiple copies of the results at the end of the day.

Our machines are NOT Diebold products, incidentally. That is, they are not the machines that have been successfully hacked in experiments/demonstrations conducted by Princeton University, and that (coincidentally or not) happened to be in use in Ohio for the 2004 election.

I'm not sure whether or not the paper trail generated by these machines meets the standards requested by MoveOn. I am concerned about fraud, and find it entirely credible that parties or factions in power might very well "steal" a close election, whether or not it can be proven that such an event may have already occurred. On the other hand, I'd hate to think it would be necessary to go all the way back to the dark ages and revert to entirely "manual" methods. I'd like to believe that an automated electronic system with print backup and double-checks, could be considered sufficiently foolproof. And I'd really like to believe that the system in place here in Louisiana fills the bill. It would be nice for us to be ahead of the curve in some sense, for once...