E-Voting Groups Are Watching a Handful of States

ACM TechNews summarizes an article on potential problems with electronic voting in several states. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting and long a critic of electronic voting machines, is more worried about the long lines on election day. Any sort of equipment failure in places like Pennsylvania and Virginia will create additional problems because they do not have polls open for early voting despite the record number of new voter registrations, particularly among Democrats.

Further, Pennsylvania and Virginia do not mandate paper-trail backups for their touch-screen electronic voting machines. Critics of e-voting say that without that paper trail, there is no way to audit the results of a touch-screen machine.

Several states do not have adequate numbers of voting machines in place to back up malfunctioning equipment.

As Smith points out

"This is an election that will sort of stress-test the [election] systems," she says. "Any problem that's going to come up is going to be amplified."

See full article in PCWorld.