Electronic Voting

What specific concerns do people have about the Diebold voting machines? Why are they not considered secure?

People don't consider Diebold machines secure because of several reasons, firstly they keep their code hidden and secret, raising peoples suspicion about the integrity of their code, secondly, their have been several instances where their machines have 'malfunctioned', such as when a machine counted votes backwards resulting in a negative score for one of the candidates. Finaly, it has been shown that the results can be easily manipulated/hacked to make a candidate win illegitimately.

If you were placed in charge of monitoring elections in California, what would you recommend to ensure the process was as fair as possible? You might choose to focus on lower-level security issues, or more high-level policy and organization issues - either is fine.

I would chose to focus on high level security because it plays a bigger part in the final count. For several people that may manipulate the machine on the voting floor to vote several times, this would have very little impact on the final vote, but if the vote totals were edited at the top then everyone's votes wouldn't have counted as they all would have been edited.