Sherry Chandler

A correspondent has drawn my attention to this article in the Washington Post today:

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Read the rest.

I was surprised the other day when Bert caught, killed and ate a very large mouse. Peanut’s instructions must be working. Sarah Jane’s legacy seems slightly more secure.

Sarah Jane was the gray smoke barn cat who showed up here in the early 90s and rescued us from the rat infestation we had been enduring for a year or so. She was one tough barncat. I once saw her wail the tar out of a big bulldog bitch which had come too close to her first kitten. The bulldog seemed to be a stray but did not stay around long enough for me to catch her. Sarah was Peanut’s grandmother and greatgrandmother to our other two surviving brood, adept rodent killers all, but now getting on in years. I was afraid that Bert would never measure up to their prowess.

B. seems puzzled whenever he catches a young mouse and always lets it get away, usually unscathed. He toys with the garter and corn snake babies in the spring until I rescue them or they scarper. He managed to kill the sparrow last week but would not eat it. But he had no problem at all with this adult mouse. Oh frabjous day!