Has the Time Come for Touchscreen Voting?
n Sunday, “CBS Sunday Morning” will air my report on touchscreen voting machines, which 50 million Americans will use in November’s election. The main characters include Avi Rubin (the Johns Hopkins professor who analyzed the software in Diebold machines and found it disturbingly insecure); Rush Holt (the Congressman who’s proposed a bill that requires a printed paper trail); Kevin Shelley (the California Secretary of State who banned or decertified e-voting machines statewide); and representatives of Diebold and Sequoia (the number 1 and 2 voting-machine makers). These machines are polarizing, hot-button gadgets. One side calls them a security and reliability nightmare, and predicts that this fall, we’ll see chaos and uncertainty that make the 2000 hanging-chad episode look like a warm-up act. The other side points out that the touchscreen machines are multilingual; they can be used unassisted by the blind and illiterate (thanks to headphones); they have a 0.0 percent overvote rate (v
