What are the odds?"> What are the odds?

With all of the fear and panic that revolves around e-voting, where do you think you’d find the safest equipment to use? If you’re Dean Heller, Nevada’s secretary of state, you go to the gambling casinos. Okay, so after he lost the state’s FY2005 budget at the slots it occurred to him that those things were all electronic! So why would casino owners mess around with on-premises e-gambling equipment if someone could tamper with it –as everyone claims can be done with e-voting machines?

So Heller went to the state officials who test the machines for fairness and popped the 60 million dollar question: “I know this isn’t within your responsibility, but could you determine, in your best estimation, which are the most secure machines available today to use electronically?”

It seems as if it wasn’t all that difficult in Nevada. “Once it gets down to the real heart of the matter, a processor is a processor, it is only the interface that makes a difference,” replied Marc McDermott, chief of the electronic services division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. “On a slot machine the interface is the spinning reels or the video display, on a voting machine you have different buttons.”

According to Nevada officials, voter turn-out should be high this year and they expect no problems with the electronic voting machines. Of course, someone has already spread a rumor that they pay 2:1 on Democrats and 6:1 on Republicans.