A few years back, in a high profile series of lawsuits, a lawyer representing some folks accused of drunk driving asked the manufacturer of a breathalyzer testing machine for access to the product's source code, so experts could review it to make sure it functioned properly. The company refused, citing trade secrets.

In their fight to overturn the U.S. Senate recount, Norm Coleman's legal team has begun pressing some Minnesota counties for documents on hundreds of thousands of ballots that were not previously disputed.

The court will decide the constitutionality of a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that seeks to protect minority voting rights by requiring a broad set of states and jurisdictions where discrimination was once routine to receive federal approval before altering any of their voting procedures.

The claim seeks costs the state incurred to correct security gaps in the voting system that were uncovered several years ago by independent investigations.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the case to proceed Tuesday, when it denied Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro Cortes permission to appeal an April 2007 ruling by Commonwealth Court that said voters may contest the legality of the widely used — and increasingly controversial — electronic voting systems.

Departing Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson is asking the County Commission for $2.3-million to cover "unanticipated expenses'' for the election, costs he blames largely on the transition to new voting machines.

"It is something that not only is Montgomery County going to have to consider, but the entire state," said Steve Harsman, director of the board of elections.

Crnich said almost 200 ballots were inexplicably dropped from the final election results. The error did not change the outcome of any of the races, Crnich said.

However, the 3,207 so-called undervotes — or ballots with no reported vote for president — are a small number in comparison to the 21,084 undervotes in the 2004 general election — a figure that sparked questions about the accuracy of vote-counting machines and was a catalyst in the push for a paper ballot system.
 

Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science at Rice University, also recommended that Colorado use paper ballots counted on scanning machines.
"Hand-marked paper ballots that are machine-scanned are the best technology that's on the market today," Wallach testified at the state Election Reform Commission meeting at the state Capitol.