This is an important story and one that ought to get your knuckles hovering over keyboard and dialing pad. Let’s start with the NY Times editorial in Saturday.

Congress has stood idly by while states have done the hard work of trying to make electronic voting more reliable. Now the Senate is taking up a dangerous bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, that would make things worse in the name of reform. If Congress will not pass a strong bill, it should apply the medical maxim: first, do no harm.

Voters cannot trust the totals reported by electronic voting machines; they are too prone to glitches and too easy to hack. In the last few years, concerned citizens have persuaded states to pass bills requiring electronic voting machines to use paper ballots or produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote. More than half of the states now have such laws.

There is still a need for a federal law, so voting is reliable in every state. A good law would require that every vote in a federal election produce a voter-verifiable paper record, and it would mandate that the paper records be the official ballots. It would impose careful standards for how these paper ballots must be “audited,” to verify that the tallies on the electronic machines are correct.

The Feinstein-Bennett bill does none of these.

Read All

Then for fuller back ground and what-to-dos go to doinaheckuvanutjob at DailyKos

We’ve seen this type of behavior from some of our judgment impaired Democratic office holders time and again in the Bush era, that failing to get their goal accomplished, they compromise to the point where their initial goal is destroyed and becomes meaningless, just for the sake of legislating and passing something, anything. Compromise is a necessary part of the legislative process, but it is impaired judgment to compromise to the point that it eliminates the very thing you were trying to accomplish. In this case it is independant verification of election results and a paper trail which is completely obliterated. There is no point in compromising if your goals are not met at all, but Dianne Fienstein flunks this basic concept of legislating.

Courage Campaign suggests signing up to be a poll worker.