A third of the nation’s 8,000 voting jurisdictions are using electronic voting for the first time this November. How are their systems expected to perform? Patchily, according to a committee of National Research Council experts.
“Some jurisdictions — and possibly many — may not be well prepared for the arrival of the November 2006 elections with respect to the deployment and use of electronic voting equipment and related technology, and anxiety about this state of affairs among election officials is evident in a number of jurisdictions.” (Washington Post)
The panel’s chairman called the November midterms “a moment of truth for electronic voting,” and the analysis a “caution sign, not a stop sign, but not a clean bill of health for a technology that everyone recognizes there may be problems with.”
For more on those problems–machines can screw up and are vulnerable to hacking–see this and this, and this.
