E-voting's big test comes Tuesday

Tuesday's U.S. general election will not only be a test for the presidential candidates, but also for electronic voting machines.

An estimated 30% of the U.S. voting population in 27 states and the District of Columbia will use electronic voting machines in the election, in which President George Bush faces Democratic challenger John Kerry. The list of states at least partially using e-voting machines reads like a who's who of critical presidential swing states: the big three of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

With most national polls showing a statistical dead heat between Bush and Kerry, problems with voting technology could play a major role in the election. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have thousands of lawyers ready to swoop in to areas where there is voting controversy. Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation, agrees with pundits who say it could take several days for the U.S. to sort out the winning presidential candidate because of potential problems with e-voting machines.

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Tuesday's U.S. general election will not only be a test for the presidential candidates, but also for electronic voting machines.

An estimated 30% of the U.S. voting population in 27 states and the District of Columbia will use electronic voting machines in the election, in which President George Bush faces Democratic challenger John Kerry. The list of states at least partially using e-voting machines reads like a who's who of critical presidential swing states: the big three of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

With most national polls showing a statistical dead heat between Bush and Kerry, problems with voting technology could play a major role in the election. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have thousands of lawyers ready to swoop in to areas where there is voting controversy. Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation, agrees with pundits who say it could take several days for the U.S. to sort out the winning presidential candidate because of potential problems with e-voting machines.

The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups critical of e-voting machines, often called direct electronic recording machines or DREs, say voting officials have no way to recheck votes cast on the machines. DREs don't give voters any indication of what's going on inside the machine, and without paper trails unavailable in most states Tuesday, voting officials have no way to conduct independent recounts, critics say.

"Election officials are not able to show us the work," said Andy Stephenson, associate director of BlackBoxVoting.org, a group critical of e-voting machines.

While e-voting proponents note that ballot stuffing is not a new trend in U.S. elections, e-voting technology could allow large-scale cheating by changing a few lines of code, Stephenson said. "It's the scale of the stuffing," he added. "It'd be a hell of a lot harder for you to carry in a bag with a million (paper) votes. It's the economy of scale."

Although voting doesn't open up in all 50 states until Tuesday, early voting has been available in several states, and problems with voting technology have already been reported in 16 states, according to the Election Incident Reporting System, operated by the Verified Voting Foundation and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Volunteers reporting e-voting incidents have identified 96 separate incidents, including 44 separate incidents in Florida and 20 in Texas as of Monday, according to the site. No other state had more than five e-voting problems reported.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.