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The Final Exam For Electronic Voting
Americans go to the polls for a pivotal mid-term election Tuesday, and one of the great unknowns is how well the numerous new machines for recording their votes will work. Election officials are busy making last-minute preparations so that candidates, not e-voting systems, make the news.
Voting-rights activists are going to be closely watching the performance of machines that many of them suspect are unreliable and insecure. According to a report released earlier this month by Electionline.org, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington are the states where problems are most likely to occur.
All of the states except New York, which uses lever-based machines, have deployed fleets of electronic optical scanners and touch-screen devices to satisfy federal law. Maryland and Ohio have been thrust into the spotlight this fall because of technical glitches and human errors that caused delays in primaries in both states.
This week's podcast also covers the growing Washington presence of Google, concerns about searches and seizures of laptop computers and other devices of air travelers, and the software industry's decision to slap lawsuits on peddlers of pirated at the eBay online auction site.
Posted by Technology Daily on November 3, 2006 11:02 AM | Permalink
