A story full of holes.

After reading Marc Eisen's piece in the March issue, "The Ballots Are Still Full of Holes," I must weigh in on the side of a voter-verified paper trail for all direct-recorded electronic voting machines.

A voter-verified paper trail is the only way to reliably audit election results. We can afford to spend extra time and money handling paper in order to maintain confidence in our voting system and accuracy in our election results.

I am familiar with Jim Dickson's complaints and find it odd that he argues so strenuously against paper when he can have his touch screen machine and paper, too. Voter-verified paper records for touch screen machines can be adapted for handicapped use (e.g., with voice dictation or touch systems). We should not disenfranchise all voters, handicapped or not, in a rush to install unverifiable touch screen computers merely to give the handicapped a secret ballot or to replace punched paper ballots.

Mary Porter

Berlin, Massachusetts

I was disappointed by Eisen's piece on electronic voting machines. I can expect the usual vacuous talking heads on the airwaves to let a shill get away with saying, "Oh, that is not true," or, "That problem is being fixed," but not The Progressive. For the grand old Progressive magazine to allow statements about new versions of Diebold software taking care of the problems without reporting which versions they are speaking of only allows the lies to fester. I suggest your writers and researchers do a more thorough job in the future.

Bob Samuelson

Minneapolis, Minnesota

"The Ballots Are Still Full of Holes" was a mixture of facts, nonsense, and falsehoods. The primary source of the nonsense and falsehoods was Jim Dickson's old laundry list of reasons why we Americans should not be allowed to verify our votes.

"It's all ivory tower theory," Dickson says of computer experts' criticism of voting computers. But there are newspaper reports of computerized elections in which votes were lost, ballots were blank, machines broke down, or results were tabulated incorrectly.

Jim Dickson's arguments against allowing us to make sure our votes are recorded correctly are all over the board and contradictory. He doesn't want elections to be too complicated for election administrators, yet he supports the use of machines that complicate the jobs of the poll workers so much that thousands of voters in California's Orange County were assigned the wrong electronic ballots in the recent election on Super Tuesday.

Dickson doesn't want to let us verify our votes because "printers jam, they run out of paper, they malfunction." Yet he advocates the use of paperless voting computers that break down, lose votes, overheat, and don't start up correctly.

We cannot trust our democracy to paperless voting computers.

Ellen Theisen

Port Ludlow, Washington 

I am appalled at the naivete of James Dickson, vice president for governmental affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, writer Marc Eisen, and Progressive Editor Matthew Rothschild. There is less than one chance in a billion that the people who are preparing to steal this fall's election with computer voting machines give a rat's ass for people with disabilities. On the other hand, there are better than 999,999,999 chances in a billion that those "elected" by the machines will repeal the Americans with Disabilities Act without waiting for their carefully chosen judges to finish disemboweling what's left of it.

Bill Hay

Soquel, California