Have you heard? There’s an election here in the US tomorrow. After years of campaigning, votes have been pouring in over the last few days as early voters hit the polls and absentee ballots begin to be tallied. If all goes well, we’ll have a President-elect by the end of Election Day. Of course, if you remember the election of 2000, it isn’t always that quick or easy.

In fact, after the fiasco presented by butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, creating minimum election administration standards for US states and budgeting nearly 3 billion dollars to help them upgrade voting machinery and clean up registration databases.

With that kind of cash and mandate out there, you might expect polling places to be full of gleaming new machines and carefully maintained lists of voters. In fact, the state of affairs is as complicated as ever, if not more so. According to 2008 National Voting Equipment Report from Election Data Services, “40% of registered voters will experience a new voting system since the last presidential election in 2004″ and more than half of the nation’s counties and over 68 of registered voters have seen changes to their voting system.”

Can you guess what type of voting equipment nearly 56% of Americans will use tomorrow?

It’s not the most common method of voting in use world-wide. That would be the hand-counted paper ballot and ballot boxes , still employed by 55 counties around the country, along with the absentee paper ballots submitted by U.S. mail in many counties.

It’s not mechanical pull lever voting machines, introduced last century to prevent fraud. Though 62 counties will be using them, pull lever machines have largely been phased out, due in no small part to transparency issues.

It’s not electronically-tabulated punch cards, either. There will be just 11 counties still knocking out those little chads tomorrow. Punch cards have been used for large-scaled data collection since the 19th century, when the government used it for the U.S. census, Herman Hollerith’s Electric Tabulating System, of course, is the ancestor to computers as we know them today.

It’s also not Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) counting machines from Premier Election Solutions (the company formerly known as Diebold). DREs are commonly referred to as touchscreens. 34% of counties nation-wide will be using touchscreen recording systems tomorrow. According to the Washington Post, however, Maryland is junking a $65 million investment in an electronic voting system in favor of paper. Virginia passed a law that bans DRE machines. After Princeton researchers released a 158-page report detailing the insecurities and inaccuracies of Sequoia’s DRE machine, many of these machines have come under increased scrutiny.

The answer is optical scanners, which combine a paper ballot with an electronic tabulating system and maintain a record of each vote cast. That record tends to be especially handy in the case of recounts. In fact, many counties have been switching touchscreen systems over optical scanners in recent years.

Vote flipping has become the election buzzword du jour. Vote flipping has been reported in Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

What’s going on? Touchscreen voting machines have been recorded choosing the wrong side of a ballot. Sometimes the result is purely for humorous effect, as when Homer Simpson experiences vote flipping:

In real life, of course, it isn’t, as evidenced by this video where a recalibrated touchscreen machine in WV appears to record a vote inaccurately.

Kim Zetter notes that the above video was heavily edited over at Wired’s 27bstroke6 Blog, though a followup post reports that evoting machines can be maliciously calibrated to favor specific candidates in the field. Computerworld reports that most vote flipping is a result of improper calibration as well. If your county uses DRE machines, make sure to consult the list of tips and reminders about how to use touchscreen voting machines posted by the Election Technology Council at ElectionTech.org).

There are widespread concerns about the security, vulnerability and reliability of e-voting systems in general. In Palm Beach, for instance, every time the votes are counted, a different vote count comes out.

So what’s the most desirable choice? According to Fortify Software, the humble hand-counted ballot is the most secure, reliable way to make sure your vote is recorded. Optical scanners rank third, after absentee ballots.

No matter which candidate you support, if you’re registered, make sure to vote!

Is the future of computing in the clouds? Ray Ozzie, who took on the mantle as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates retired, thinks that the answer may be “yes” — at least on the back end.

In his keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a new cloud computing operating system (OS). The platform is a key component of Microsoft’s strategy, presumably one that Ozzie has been working on since 2005, when he talked about the future of Windows Live services.

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference has been around since 1992, when, according to Wikipedia, the Win32 API was first demonstrated and “Chicago,” the codename for Windows 95, was first mentioned.

For the rest of the 1990s, if you wanted to know what new technology Microsoft would be introducing, there was no better place to be. IT industry veterans refer to it simply as “PDC,” an acronym you’ll see frequently in online shorthand. (Note: You can track hashtags for this year’s conference on Twitter under PDC08 or PDC2008, though just PDC produces plenty of hits as well.)

Now, in the late “oughts,” there are of course many other IT conferences that address technologies important to IT professionals and consumers alike. Even so, Microsoft still uses the platform afforded by PDC to introduce initiatives that will be of great interest to the Windows development community. This year was no different.

With this announcement, Redmond-based software giant now appears to be embracing the platform as a service (PaaS) paradigm similar to that deployed by Google and Amazon. While on one level, this is similar to the software as a service (SaaS) distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over the Internet, Microsoft vision is even more ambitious.

In Ozzie’s view, Azure is a massive, highly scalable service platform that will allow both individuals and corporate customers to build applications in the cloud. In fact, it’s an entire new tier of computing. If the PC was the first tier and the enterprise the second, the Web-facing tier is the third, made up of Internet-facing systems for computation, storage, networking, application hosting, etc. In other words, the sorts of things that Amazon offers through its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

If you develop an application and need to scale it from 10,000 users to 10 million — quickly — these platforms can help.

Ozzie differentiated Azure from other PaaS precisely through its integration with the Windows ecosystem. Azure builds further upon the programming support for the Web services introduced by .NET and the synchronization of data extended to consumers through Live Mesh.

Microsoft hopes to attract developers with support for popular standards like SOAP, REST & XML, especially those already familar with Visual Studio.

The Azure Services Platform will allow developers to build applications out “in the cloud” that are available to PCs, online users and everyone in between, including thin clients like the iPhone or netPCs. Windows Azure will be the component for hosting and scalable storage, computation and networking for Web services.

Other key components of the Azure Services Platform (which I’ll avoid calling an ASP, as much as the shoe might fit) include:

• Microsoft SQL Services
• Microsoft .Net Services
• Live Services,
• Microsoft SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The introduction of Azure is about much more than simply competing with Amazon or Google. It’s about finding a way to remain relevant in future that might not involve everyone using Windows as a desktop operating system, Office for office productivity applications or Exchange for email, at least as we recognize them.

Microsoft is now pitching a vision to businesses that resembles a pay-as-you-go model, the sort of paradigm that might make sense to, say, early adopters of IT chargeback systems. If a business wants to add on more services, liked hosted email or application storage, it can increase or add a subcription. Azure will provide a common foundation for the Live versions of its applications to be run — and businesses a means to save money by hosting services externally.

This isn’t going to happen right away — Microsoft won’t actually roll anything out until 2009. Developers are still getting acquainted with new tools for building hosted applications.

If this vision catches on, however, jokes about this cloud OS being vaporware are likely to be blown away, along with some of the concerns about Microsoft’s long-term prospects for growth in this Internet age.

As new technologies enter the marketplace, archives of older versions or newly redundant standards live on throughout the Web. For the user struggling with a buggy new application or that needs to open a vintage file, abandonware can be just the ticket.