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Ohio report recommends scrapping electronic voting

Like California and Florida before it, habitual swing state Ohio has just issued a report slamming its three providers of electronic voting equipment -- including, of course, renamed Diebold -- and recommending that the 50 counties which use them scrap the machines in favor of a paper-trail-leaving optical scanning method. The report, commissioned by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, details the ways in which white hat hackers were able to infiltrate the systems, easily picking locks, using portable devices to manipulate vote counts, and even introducing "malignant software" into boards of election servers. Brunner's plan calls for the entire state's voting infrastructure to be overhauled by next year's presidential elections, a move likely to be lauded by touchscreen voting's many critics, but coming "about eight years too late, jerks -- thanks a lot," according to usually-even-tempered former candidate Al Gore.