Does Touch-Screen Voting Really Work?
Even absent political hanky-panky, how reliable is electronic voting? The Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), performed a study to answer this question. This Project found DREs to be among the worst performing systems in existence for tabulating the vote. “The problem is, computer touch-screen machines and other so-called DRE systems are significantly less reliable than punch cards,” the Project states, “irrespective of their vulnerability to interference [editor’s emphasis].” The Voting Technology Project actually determined that hand counting of paper ballots was the most reliable system![2] Bugs in the Software Itself Even assuming the accuracy of touch-screen recording, researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered “stunning flaws” in the electronic election software they studied. These flaws included: • “putting t
