Thanks to the Iowa Voters blog, I learned about a transparency project in Humboldt County, California, which uncovered errors made by machines counting paper ballots in the recent election. Click here for more detail on the program and the errors it revealed.

This story provides further evidence that we need verified voting across the country. Mandatory manual audits of voter-verified paper records would allay fears about malfunctions or tampering with optical scanners.

As this map at VerifiedVoting.org shows, 18 states have mandatory manual audits of voter-verified paper records. Another 13 states, including Iowa, require paper ballots, but without mandatory audits to make sure the scanners are producing accurate counts.

It's great that Iowa eliminated touchscreen voting machines last year, but we also need to make sure machines are counting paper ballots accurately. I hope Secretary of State Mike Mauro will work toward this goal.

I recommend that you check out the Verified Voting site to learn more about this issue. Also, it's not too late to urge Barack Obama to support verified voting at the federal level.

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Seven weeks after election day, there is still no declared winner in Minnesota's Senate race. If the frequent updates on the MyDD front page aren't enough to satisfy your Minnesota recount fix, WineRev's Daily Kos diaries will tell you everything you need to know about what's been going on.

Norm Coleman has been in court trying to prevent ballots that might give Al Franken the lead from being counted, and after Franken did take a narrow lead, Coleman's team was back in court looking for other ways to subtract from Franken's total. Imagine how much more contentious this process would be if Minnesota did not use paper ballots in every county. Less than one one-hundredth of a percent of the vote separates Franken from Coleman. If touchscreen voting machines had been involved in any way, large numbers of people would surely believe the election had been rigged in favor of whoever came out ahead.

Mark Halvorson of Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota published this piece on what has worked well during the Minnesota recount, and how the system could still be improved.

Iowa had more state legislative races decided by less than 1 percent of the vote this year than in any other election I can remember. Fortunately, the state legislature heeded Secretary of State Mike Mauro's call to require optical scanner machines with paper ballots in every county, and Governor Chet Culver signed that bill into law this spring. Otherwise the legitimacy of these extremely close races could have been questioned.

As this map at VerifiedVoting.org shows, Minnesota is one of 18 states that has mandatory manual audits of voter-verified paper records. Iowa is one of 13 states that require paper ballots, but without mandatory audits to make sure the scanners are producing accurate counts.

Election integrity advocates in Iowa are encouraging Mauro to ask the legislature to take the next step toward "verified voting" (mandatory manual audits of voter-verified paper records). That would allay fears about malfunctions or tampering with the optical scanners as they count the votes.

Some other states have a lot further to go. In New Jersey, advocates are still working toward mandatory paper ballots, while some politicians want to take the penny-wise, pound-foolish path of retrofitting touchscreen machines to print out paper receipts.

Congress has so many huge issues to tackle in the next two years, but I sincerely hope they will pass a federal law to ensure that all Americans will be able to vote with paper ballots. This page at VerifiedVoting.org summarizes all the relevant pending legislation at the federal and state levels.

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This is just something silly to do, like participating in a football pool...

Here are my revised predictions for the outcome of the election:

Obama with 393 electoral votes and 57% of popular vote; surprise states include: GA, ND, NC, IN, MO, WV.
The battleground is provably changed because the dynamic is changed.  I think if the election were pushed back a month that the popular vote would end up stabilizing around 62% for Obama; but some Americans just have not had time to get to know him yet.

Other predictions follow...

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Last night, the Clinton camp sent this letter to the Texas Democratic State Party chair. You'll be hearing lots of spin from other camps in the news in the next few days, so I thought I'd provide both the original letter and a bit of context.

In Texas,  Democratic Party caucuses are done with sign-in sheets as a verifiable paper trail for deciding the proportion of delegates to be awarded to each candidate for President.  That is, each attendee signs in and identifies who they are representing in writing.  There is no provision for 'hand counts' or other methods of counting votes for delegates.  All caucus attendees are required to prove that they voted in the primary in order to be included in the final count.  If for any reason an attendee does not have their voter registration card with them, the voting rolls from the early vote and the on-the-day vote are available to precinct workers to refer to prior to allowing an attendee to sign in as an eligible attendee.

For the last 2 weeks, there have been a multitude of reports of misbehavior, sloppy math (when determining final caucus totals), people who attended -- and voted -- in the caucuses who were not even registered to vote (some of these were even selected as delegates) and more and more and more.

The Texas Democratic Party -- at a minimum -- is supposed to 1) verify that the caucus attendees were registered voters, 2) determine that the math was done correctly and 3) provide lists of (at least their own) delegates to each campaign.  The TDP has been so overwhelmed, both with the numbers of attendees to check and the size and frequency of the problems, that they say they cannot accomplish these tasks prior to the scheduled County/State Senatorial Conventions on March 29.

The Clinton campaign has requested that the County/State Senatorial Conventions be delayed until that information can be provided and the State Party can accomplish its job.

Texas has a paper trail for caucus results and delegate selection. That the State Party is essentially saying "Yeah we do, but we don't have time to look at it" is a failure of the highest order.  This HAS to be dealt with at this next stage in the process, or the process breaks down completely.

No one knows what the results of actually referring to the paper trail will be.   It could net Obama more delegates, it could net Clinton more delegates.  BOTH camps should be joining to demand that the paper trail be examined.

The text of the letter from the Clinton campaign follows:

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Why is no candidate talking about Verified Voting?

It's sad really, that a topic that everybody pretty much agrees on, that everybody should have the ability to vote and know their vote accounted, has turned into something divisive and fracturing.

I used to have high hopes that Rep. Holt's bill in the house would pass in the Republican congress, after all it had plenty of Republican co-sponsors, and there had been multiple companion bills in the Senate. That didn't happen, the Republican leadership would never let it come to a vote.

Now we have a Democratic congress, and while we hold only a bare majority in the Senate, still the legislation never ends up coming to a vote.

Moreover, anytime "irregularities" show up, people are immediately divided up into "deniers" and "fraudsters".

While it is true that you can't blame every electoral loss or mishap on "Diebold", it is also foolish to pretend that the problem doesn't exist or that "the states have it under control."

In some cases this is true, but why fight 50 battles when we don't have to?

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