As many as 25 percent of Americans are expected to use paperless electronic voting machines in the upcoming November elections, according to the Verified Voting Foundation, but confidence has been eroded by incidents showing vulnerabilities. The foundation, which seeks more reliable election systems, contends that voting machines in 11 states are all-electronic, with no paper systems for recounts, and that many other jurisdictions have some of these systems in place. … Pamela Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation said these incidents highlight the fact “that you can have insider challenges as well as outsider hacks. It points out that you have to be able to check the system.” Election security and technology has been an issue in the United States since the 2000 president election marred by “hanging chads” in Florida that muddled the result.
US laws enacted since then encourage the use of new technology including touch-screen ballots. But some critics say these can be vulnerable to hackers and that some lack a “paper trail” which could allow a recount in case of machine failure. “We still have a number of states which do not have what I call resilient recountable systems,” Smith said.
“If they do have problems they may not be able to recover from them. So we would like states to move to recoverable systems where they could do a recount if there were a problem.”
Full Article: Questions linger in US on high-tech voting.