Election Reform

You're saying KY counts its paper ballots by hand??? And you can observe the counting? If it's true that the vote in KY is on paper ballots and that these ballots are counted by hand, this is the most amazing and wonderful thing I've heard in a long time, but I doubt it. Is it just your county or precinct?

Chain of custody has nothing to do w/ whether or not the machine counted vote is maliciously programmed. The malicious programming is the result of INSIDERS, either the manufacturers of the machines (or their employees) or local officials (as happened in the Clay County KY case where a whole bunch of local officials fixed the vote for over a decade and later spent a good deal of time in the slammer for so doing) or a combination of things. For example, the machine can be pre-programmed to easily accept a program from the memory card (used to transfer the results from the individual machines to the central tabulators). This is what happened in the experiment at the end of "Hacking America" where the Finnish computer expert used the memory card to transfer an executable file to the machine, an opti-scan BTW (and in another part of the documentary a Diebold official swears that a memory card cannot transfer an executable file).

Chain of custody is very important if there is to be an audit or recount to avoid insiders adding or taking away paper ballots already (supposedly) cast before the recount takes place.