Over 85% of ballots cast in tomorrow’s hotly contested Pennsylvania Democratic Party Primary will be on machines that are hackable, prone to failure, and unverifiable. One blogger describes the election equipment used in Pennsylvania to be “faith based” because there is no paper trail to determine if the votes have been accurately recorded and counted.

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called “Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails” (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

With or without a so-called “paper trail” printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.

Ars technica goes on to say that the Republicans and the White House have recently blocked legislation to phase out paperless electronic voting machines before the November presidential election and they (ars, not the Republicans) provided a handy guide for how easy it is to hack the voting machines (for educational purposes, of course).

This is the one thing that Nevada does right. We have electronic voting machines with attached printers and have had them since the late 1990s. The last thing you do before leaving the booth is to read the printout on the paper tape to make sure it matches what you voted. If there is a discrepancy, someone can hand-count the election if necessary to determine a winner. After the fiasco in Florida in 2000 and gross irregularities in 2004, it is incredible that many states do not vote on machines that allow paper audit trails. It’s even more incredible that the Bush White House and the Republicans are so resistant to machines that allow an audit trail.