Electronic Voting Raises Questions of Trust, Confidence, and Reliability for Voters in 2008 Presidential Election

Survey Nation wants to know: Do you trust electronic voting? Progress can be costly. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines fail in each election. In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he says. "But they're very disturbing to the public." The manufacture of one such machine even admitted to a fatal error in the system that can produce inaccurate results. For instance, in the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself. Can we trust an imperfect system when our most basic democratic freedom is on the line? What's the alternative? Paper ballots with their now infamous hanging chads? And it's not as if fraud, mismanagement, confusion and inaccuracies have never occurred in the classic voting system. Is electronic voting the next logical step for a 21st century democracy? Is our technology ready for it?

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