There's a major turnaround at the League of Women Voters. In the face of mass protest from the membership over their support for electronic voting machines with no paper trail, the leadership of the organisation has been forced into a U-turn. They have dropped their support for paperless voting and adopted a resolution in favour of ``voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible.''

``My initial reaction is incredible joy and relief,'' said computer scientist Barbara Simons, 63, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a league member from a chapter in Palo Alto, Calif. ``This issue was threatening to split the league apart. ... The league now has a position that I feel very comfortable supporting.''

Well done Barbara (who I had the pleasure of meeting at a conference in Oxford in recent years) and your fellow protestors.

And meanwhile in Florida (wot won it for Bush, in Sun-speak)state officials have declared that "Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election".

The story of electronic voting could fill more than one book.