STILL MORE ON ELECTRONIC VOTING:

E-voting, once revered as the savior of an antiquated and problematic election system, is slipping off its pedestal. Legislators nationwide are backing off, rethinking their trust in so-called direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. They want answers to mounting allegations of shoddy security.

Diebold maintains its AccuVote-TS voting machine is safe, even though its own Web site sparked the criticism in the first place.

The site’s confidential files gave Johns Hopkins University researchers a rare peek into the secretive world of touch-screen DRE voting systems. And they blasted Diebold, asserting in a July 23 study that the company’s software is unsafe and an easy target for hackers.

Diebold basically called the Johns Hopkins study hogwash less than a week later. The research, the company said, was based on outdated, incomplete material and biased from the start. But the security concerns chief researcher Avi Rubin raised were still more than enough to rattle officials across the nation.

You already know what I think about this.