NY Times on voting machines
A good article on recent history and where things stand today with voting machines. A quote:
The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.
Generally a good article, although it tends to oversimplify - touch-screen does not have to mean paperless, for example. There’s a bit in the last page that points out that optical scan ballots are not a panacea:
Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone doesn’t mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the morass of arguing over “voter intent.” The machines also need to be carefully calibrated so they don’t miscount ballots. Blind people may need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer scientists to hack his machines.
A DRE+VVPAT system can offer accessibility features that a sheet of paper alone cannot do, and can also simplify complex ballots. I spoke to an election judge from Half Moon Bay who described just how complex the paper balloting procedure is during a primary election. They must have ballots on hand for each of twelve registered political parties, with instructions written in any language spoken by more than 5% of the local population, which in his case is English, Chinese and Spanish. The resulting thirty-six ballots are difficult to handle.