Despite some glitches, electronic voting machines appear to have worked reliably in last week鈥檚 US presidential election. 鈥淚 expected much worse,鈥� said Ted Selker of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. 鈥淗uge improvements have been made.鈥�
However, some concerns were borne out. The Election Protection coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors, reported more than 1100 voter complaints about e-voting machines. The most troubling came from Florida and Texas, where some voters reported that voting for one candidate on a touch-screen machine caused a cross to appear in another candidate鈥檚 box.
And there could be worse to come. Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who spearheaded the criticisms of e-voting with a report on touch-screen machines in July 2003, says that even if there were no cases of fraud or inaccuracy in this election, it does not vindicate e-voting machines.
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Rubin says that the biggest threat comes from software problems that affect the outcome in an undetectable way. 鈥淚f we continue to use the kind of insecure machines that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before someone exploits them.鈥�