US elections already hit by miscasts of automated voting

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 2 Nov 2004 at 10:56

Electronic voting machines are mis-casting votes during the presidential election.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claims that it has received reports that the 'summary' screen, which users see to verify their vote before submission, does not match the candidate for whom they in fact voted.

Such problems have been identified on machines from at least half a dozen States.

Voters say that even when they backed up a few screens to correct the problem, the error continued to occur.

Incorrectly recorded votes account for as much as 20 percent of the e-voting problems reported through the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), an online database in which volunteers with the Election Protection Coalition are recording and tracking voting problems.

'We're likely to see these types of problems repeated on Election Day,' said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. 'As a short-term measure, we strongly encourage voters who use touch-screen voting machines to proof their ballots at the review stage. But while we can try to address obvious, visible problems like these, the problems we really worry about are the ones that the voters and poll watchers can't see. Often the only you catch these flaws are through audits - yet most of these machines lack even the most basic audit feature: a voter-verified paper trail.'