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Many voters seem comfortable with the machines. As he emerged from a polling place in Palm Beach Gardens during Florida's August primary, Mike Tuchman, a physician, said he hadn't thought twice about casting his vote on a computer.
"We make decisions about life and death every day with these things," he said. "So I guess they can count my vote."
Well, maybe not. Last fall, Fort Lauderdale political strategist Ellyn Bogdanoff won a state Senate seat by only 12 votes out of 10,844 cast. Mysteriously, 137 voters cast blank electronic ballots in the election. Either they had taken the trouble to go to the polls and vote for no one, officials figured, or the machines hadn't registered the votes.
State law mandated a recount in such a close election. But since the votes were stored only in the computer's memory, that was impossible. So election officials just certified the race.
"The potential for problems this year dwarfs what happened in 2000, because there's nothing to check," said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Delray Beach Democrat who has lobbied for mandatory paper trails since Florida started considering touch-screen machines. He even sued the state over the issue and lost; the case is on appeal.
Anomalies like this have occurred with electronic voting machines around the country:
• In Fairfax County, Va., some voters who chose School Board member Rita S. Thompson last November saw an "X" appear next to her name, then the "X" disappeared. After the election, tests revealed that about 1% of votes cast for Thompson were deleted. She lost by 1,662 votes out of more than 157,000 cast.
Hinds County, Miss., spent $1.6 million on touch-screen machines. The machines overheated as soon as polls opened last November. Polling places ran out of paper ballots, some of which were handled improperly. The state legislature ordered a new election in one race, which cost the county about $25,000.
In Bernalillo County, N.M., a software glitch in the computer program used to tally votes ignored 12,000 of the 48,000 electronic ballots cast in a 2003 election. Officials didn't notice for 10 days.
After touch-screen voting terminals made by Diebold Election Systems malfunctioned in a March primary, California election officials discovered that the machines contained uncertified software.
The state barred four counties from using some Diebold models and approved their use in 11 other counties only after the counties agreed to new security requirements, including making paper ballots available as an alternative to voters. The state sued Diebold this month for allegedly lying about the security of some of its equipment and is seeking a refund of the $8 million it spent and an additional $11 million spent by Alameda County.
The state's feud with Diebold prompted Solano County in Northern California to cancel a $4.1-million contract with Diebold, return 1,200 touch-screen machines and replace them with optical scanners that read paper and pencil ballots.
"There are some advantages" to touch-screen voting machines, said California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. "But they were brought into play before their time."
Election officials aren't the only ones concerned about technical flaws in voting machines. Nearly 2,000 engineers, academics and other techies have signed a petition deriding computerized voting machines as "inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction and malicious tampering." At the Defcon computer security conference in July, 81% of computer professionals polled said they had "no confidence or little confidence" in the "security and reliability" of electronic voting machines.
Computer scientists from Johns Hopkins University, UC San Diego and Rice University studied the source code for Diebold machines and reported in an academic journal that the software was poorly written and
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