Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring their own potential problems, voting experts say. The scanners can break down, leading to delays and confusion for poll workers and voters. And the paper ballots of about a third of all voters will be counted not at the polling place but later at a central county location. That means that if a voter has made an error — not filling in an oval properly, for example, a mistake often made by the kind of novice voters who will be flocking to the polls — it will not be caught until it is too late. As a result, those ballots will be disqualified.

A report on the November midterms released this past week by three different e-voting activist groups describes problems with electronic voting machines in 36 states. The report (PDF), entitled "E-Voting Failures in the 2006 Mid-Term Elections: A Sampling of Problems Across the Nation," is based on reports made to a non-partisan hotline that operated the day of the November 7 midterm elections. Calls to the hotline yielded 1022 separate incident reports, the vast majority of which concerned problems with direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines like the Diebold Accuvote model described in my article on how to steal an election. Problems were also reported with scanners and electronic ballot markers, but DREs made up the bulk of the complaints.

A Diebold insider is blowing the whistle on the company's continued lack of concern about security holes in its voting software. The insider wrote to Brad Friedman, a somewhat shrill political blogger, claiming the company is instructing technicians to keep quiet about the security flaws. This is despite the vulnerability being listed on the US-CERT website for the last year.

When asked about the state of e-voting and significance of openness, two leading experts -- VerifiedVoting's David Dill, who testified last month before the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, and Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University computer science professor and critic of current e-voting solutions -- offered their thoughts via e-mail.

What is e-voting? E-voting, or electronic voting, refers to computerized voting machines that use electronic ballots rather than paper ones. They're also known as direct-recording electronic machines, or DREs. E-voting machines consist of three types: touch-screen machines that let voters cast votes by touching an electronic ballot on an LCD screen, punch-key machines that use a keypad for making selections on an electronic ballot, and wheel machines that require voters to rotate a wheel and press a button.

The guidelines, published in late June, call for vendors to follow better programming practices and make some suggestions for addressing problems with vote integrity. Computer security experts say the guidelines are a step in the right direction, but fall short of making voting systems secure. They also don't require systems to produce a voter-verified paper audit trail, which would allow voters to confirm their vote.

Most of the county’s 80,000 registered voters will vote as they have in the past, on paper ballots. However, any voter may use the electronic voting machine, according to material from the Secretary of State’s office.

Tuesday, what was old was new again, and for folks like Ruby Slappy, using a paper ballot was just fine with her. "We feel like (the electronic system) was not doing its job, what it's supposed to do," said Slappy, of Aliquippa. "If you vote for one person, someone else's name comes up. I always liked the paper ballots." The county was using paper ballots Tuesday for the first time since May 1998, because the Pennsylvania Department of State decertified the Patriot electronic voting system, saying it was unreliable.

With the advent of electronic-voting machines, Bev Harris has become a kind of voting-rights oracle. Her message is simple: the increasing reliance on electronic voting poses a grave threat to American democracy.

VOTING machines, internet broadcasting of parliament and online petitions are key recommendations in an inquiry into electronic voting in Victoria [Australia]. The inquiry, chaired by Labor MP Michael Leighton, investigated how new technologies such as mobile phone and the internet could increase participation in the political process. "Technologies like the internet are an excellent means to reconnect people with their government," Mr Leighton said.