“E-voting technology has come a long way since the 2000 U.S. presidential election, when voting equipment problems erased an estimated 1.5 million votes during one of the closest elections in U.S. history,” Robert McMillan reports for IDG News Service. “But progress has zig-zagged. After Congress passed the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), counties spent billions of dollars upgrading to new electronic voting machines, many of which have now been dumped because they were unusable or, worse still, untrustworthy.”
“California and Florida, for example, have mostly abandoned e-voting systems in favor of optical scan machines where a paper ballot is scanned into a computer, leaving a paper record of the vote that can be manually recounted in the event of an audit,” McMillan reports. “That’s the gold standard, voting experts say: voting machines that use paper ballots that are routinely audited for errors.”
McMillan reports, “And while election observers say that more people will vote on paper ballots using optical scan machines than did in 2004, there is still room for plenty of e-voting glitches this year in a race that could have the highest turnout in 100 years. Here are a few things that could go wrong with electronic voting on Nov. 4.”
What could go wrong:
• Machine malfunction
• Touch-screen calibration errors
• Training problems/Unskilled poll workers
• Human error by voters
• Voter registration database problems
• Malicious attack/Hacking the election
Full article here.