Speaking of things we've been warned about

Say what you want about the Iowa Caucuses, it's unwieldy and awkward and susceptible to organizing and peer pressure, but it is also old-fashioned and reliable. Now, finally, the unreliability of electronic voting my finally enter mainstream...and reveal the damage it has already done.

Coming between the Iowa and New Hampshire tallies, this Sunday's cover of The New York Times Magazine ought to strike a chord. It shows a man inside an exploding voting booth with a WARNING label over it and the words: "Your vote may be lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked."

The massive Clive Thompson article, titled "The Bugs in the Machines," is quite chilling. "After the 2000 election," it opens, "counties around the country rushed to buy new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. Is America ready for another contested election?" One key passage: "The earliest crtiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe -- disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks -- but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government."

One expert says that "about 10 percent" of the devices fail in each election.

To this point, I've avoided electronic voting machines...at leat as long as a ballot reader isn't considered electronic voting. I do not think the old system was broken, just because "punch card" ballots were fucked. But, what happened in Ohio in 2004 cannot be allowed to happen again, it was at least as bad, if more ignored, than what happened in Dade County 4 years earlier.