The collision of two bad ideas -- unverified e-voting and VeriSign -- is a really, really bad idea.

VeriSign has been chosen by Accenture (the former Andersen Consulting) to provide key components of an Internet absentee voting system for Americans abroad. This is the same VeriSign that recently unilaterally altered the workings of the domain name system to return a VeriSign search page when someone mis-typed a .com or .net URL.

I can see it now: mis-mark your ballot and your vote gets automatically redirected to the candidate of VeriSign's choice. "We found these similar candidates: Did You Mean to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger?"