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Wondering whether our Democracy is safe from e-hacking? Well, the latest out of New Mexico is extremely disturbing, to say the least:

A glitch that would have kept votes from being counted in the presidential and other top-of-the-ticket races was discovered during a pre-election check of a voting machine in Santa Fe County, officials said.

The problem in the coding of the machine's memory card would have prevented the tabulating machine from counting the votes in the presidential, U.S. Senate and 3rd District congressional races when Democrats or Republicans marked their ballots indicating they wanted to vote a straight ticket.

And which districts was this "error" discovered?

Heavily Democratic Santa Fe County was the only county in which the problem occurred, according to Automated Election Services, which prints ballots, codes memory cards and provides other election assistance to the state and counties.

Is there any real explanation offered to the voting public? It doesn't look like it:

Because the problem was in memory cards, all the county's tabulating machines would have been affected had it not been caught, Rainey said. Rainey could not provide an explanation of just how the error was made.

And finally, do you remember how close the election was in New Mexico in 2000 and 2004?

Democrat Al Gore won New Mexico in 2000 by just 366 votes. President Bush won the state in 2004 by fewer than 6,000 votes over Democrat John Kerry.

Bottom line: Do not vote the "Party Line" ballot when voting. Cast your ballot for each candidate separately. BlackBoxVoting.org has the skinny:

1) NEVER CHOOSE THE STRAIGHT PARTY VOTE OPTION, because it alerts the computer as to your party preference and allows software code to trigger whatever function the programmer has designed.

2) SEND THIS INFORMATION OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, blog it, root n' toot it out there to get the word out.

3) ESPECIALLY GET THE WORD OUT TO PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING STATES, which have straight party voting options:

- Alabama
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kentucky
- Michigan
- New Mexico
- North Carolina
- Oklahoma
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Utah
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin

(Missouri and New Hampshire had straight party voting in earlier years, but have cancelled the straight party option for the Nov. 2008 election; however, the Straight Party software is still on Missouri and New Hampshire election management computers.)

Donate to Bev Harris at BlackBoxVoting.org, too, if you can. She's fighting a valiant fight over there and needs to be supported. She was also the focus of the HBO documentary, "Hacking Democracy."

Read more on how e-voting machines are less secure than simple slot machines. And this was exposed four years ago! Have things changed since then?

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