FOREWARD: Introducing the User-Friendly, Error-Free, Tamper-
Proof Voting Machine of the Future! (WARNING: Satisfaction not
guaranteed if used before 2006.) Broken Machine Politics By Paul
O'Donnell On a cool afternoon last February, five politicians
gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley for a meeting of the
Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Their task: to replace
the county's antiquated punch card voting system with $20
million worth of touchscreen computers. Executives and lobbyists
from three different voting-tech vendors were scheduled to
present their wares, but the outcome was practically
predetermined. Supervisors on the board's finance committee had
already anointed a winner: Sequoia Voting Systems, based 35
miles north in Oakland. It was all over but the voting. And then
the computer scientists showed up: Peter Neumann, principal
computer scientist at R&D firm SRI; Barbara Simons, past
president of the Association for Computing Machinery; and
Stanford computer science professor David Dill. Th