National: Counting Votes Is a Tricky Business | Discovery News
As the Presidential election nears, attention turns to voting – and counting those votes. Thanks to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, this year’s elections will be the first time that every state will have traded in their old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines for electronic voting. But computerized voting is not without its problems. Glitches arise. Paper jams. Service personnel are not always available in times of trouble. And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s always human error to add to the mix. One thing’s for certain, though. Everyone wants his or her vote to count. Despite some recent voting debacles, the country is moving to a more accurate way of tallying your vote. “What you need is a system where if something goes wrong you have a way to recover,” said Pam Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan organization that studies voting systems. “You want to be able to reconstruct what should have been the outcome without a do-over.”