Wondering about ballot counting

Yesterday was an election day in France (next Sunday will be too) and as always, I participated in the counting process of the ballot after the election closure.
After reading this article (and it is not the first I'm reading about the various problem with ballot counting in the US), I'm wondering why it seems so difficult to get a correct process there ?
Currently, in France, election process is quite simple : there are paper ballot for each candidate (or candidate list). Each elector should take 1 paper ballot per list, do his choice in the insulator and place the envelop containing his vote in the ballot box.
Once the election is off, voters who volunteered during the day are doing the counting process:
they are grouped by 4 person by table, then receive 100 ballots : one person open the envelope, another one get it, checks it is ok and announce the vote. The two other person have accounting the vote separatly on paper list and at the end of the 100 ballots, both lists are compared to check for errors.
It might be as fast or high-tech as electronic voting (it tooks around 1h to check 167 ballots for one table and there were 3 teams doing the same work at my election office) but I think it is quite safe and not as disturbing as the process error I can read in the Wired article (miscalibration of optical scanner, paper jam and so on).
So, I wonder, why ballot counting seems so problematic in the US (either the punch card, optical or electronic voting) ? Isn't paper ballot not enough ?

Gdm, evolution, etc..

I had a good day today :
I was able to upload a new version of gdm 2.4.x package fixing two bugs which had been reported for Mdk 9.2 and I never had time to investigate them (pam nologin issue, which took me two days to fix and bad greeter refresh).
Also, jpr released Evolution 1.4.6 so I updated the evolution stack for Mdk 10.0.
QA found some strange behaviour in nautilus with dnd to desktop but hopefully Alex already fixed the problem on HEAD last december, so it was just simple backporting.
Also, Mdk 10.0 Community Edition is publicaly available over FTP/Bittorrent and I don't had big issues reported on its GNOME 2.4..

esound release

Yes, I know, I suck as an esound maintainer :) Just blame the others GNOME hackers who forced me into it.. Anyway, I found some time today to do a new release, based entirely on patches from contributors. Thanks a lot, guys...

PlanetPlanet, Fosdem

Yesterday, I updated my little webserver to use PlanetPlanet instead of spicyroll for my personal news aggregator.. This is really great, now, I'm able to aggregate Planet GNOME with my other news feeds.
Fosdem : Glynn, we are brothers : Thanks to sxpert (I'll buy you a beer, dude), I discovered this morning I completely screwed up my fosdem booking (train and hotel), because I thought Fosdem was last week-end of February.. I was able to change train ticket and hotel booking and it will cost me 45EUR more than expected.. Next time, I'll check my calendar more carefully as well as cancellation fees for hotels..

Friends

Thanks to everybody who added me on their Orkut list.. Even my Spamassassin thought it was spam :) I've started digging in the website and it is really nice. Too bad its UI is not yet available for non-english speaker.
Oh, BTW, of course, in my last entry, I was speaking about Solutions Linux 2004 (thanks Sergej)

Solutions Linux and other things

Yesterday, I was on Solutions Linux 2004 exhibition (previously known as Linux Expo Paris). I was at Mandrakesoft booth the entire morning (our booth was a little too small, so I could't do my 1/2h hour presentation of the distro) but many people came and when I had some time to rest, it was already 2pm.. I was on GNOME-FR booth (BTW, thanks again Tim and HP for the nice posters) and I did some demo on the accessibility tools such as gnopernicus, gok and dasher.
There was a nice evening meal with all the associations which were on Solutions Linux and there was a very productive discussion between all the french-speaking GNOME guys (there will be probably more about that in the following weeks).
It seems I don't any friend, since I didn't receive any mail to join Orkut :(

Menus and various stuff

Havoc: ok, I failed too to get XDG menus in a good shape in time for MandrakeLinux 10.0. I had a working patch Friday afternoon but it failed support for the optional Layout/DefaultLayout from XDG menu spec and after a quick discussion with Mark, getting it working in a clean way can't be done quickly. And I'm not very confident in the quality
of my patch. So, MandrakeLinux 10.0 will still use our patched version of Debian menu system and I plan to push my patch and get everything in shape as soon as GNOME 2.7 will start.
Yesterday, a friend of mine came to give me back books and DVD I lent him and he showed me Beyond Good And Evil on PS2 : very nice game, done by a french team of UbiSoft, in Montpellier..
Today, I went to see Gothika with a friend. Not bad but not exceptional..
I was very sad when I read about Mark Finlay death. I didn't knew him but I read his blog on PlanetGNOME and I could see his contribution to GNOME. The last 3 months have really been bad for GNOME hackers :(