Avi and the Maryland Primary...

Avi Rubin, the director of my grant (ACCURATE) has an amazing account of his day as a poll worker in Baltimore, MD: "My day at the polls - Maryland primary '06". His precinct wasn't even one of the many in Montgomery County where the smartcards were not delivered with the machines to the polls (these cards are required to open the polls and cast votes). His narrative also talks about severe problems with the electronic pollbook (essentially a networked device that checks in voters) as well as a DESI contractor at his polling place who quit his job at about 4pm. Amazing.

If you're an election technology geek, like I am, (or even just into qualitative research methods) you can really appreciate his narrative much like the write-up of a participant observer. It's great data; hard fought, at that.

Also, if you're an election technology geek, you'll want to keep your eyes peeled tomorrow morning... there will be a very big research-related development. I personally can't wait.

UPDATE [2006-09-13T07:33:24]: Ari Feldmen, Alex Halderman and Ed Felten of Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a study of the AccuVote-TS voting system. They show that you can "steal votes" on these machines without any detectable trace and that these machines are susceptible to memory-card borne viruses.