[Dhaka Tribune] US election officials have known about the shortcomings of touch-screen systems since shortly after they were widely adopted in the early 2000s, when researchers showed that vote results could be manipulated with tools as simple as a magnet and a Palm Pilot-style handheld device.
The systems have produced questionable results in some elections. In Florida, more than 18,000 iVotronic machines did not record a vote in a 2006 congressional race in which the margin of victory was less than 400 votes. In Fairfax County, Virginia, electronic machines subtracted one vote for every hundred cast for one candidate in a 2003 school-board race. More than 4,400 electronic ballots in Carteret County, North Carolina, were lost and never recovered in the 2004 presidential election.
Since 2008, states such as Maryland have traded in their touch-screen machines for optical-scan systems. Others like Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, and Ohio have added printers to their touch-screen machines which produce a backup paper trail, while Washington and Colorado moved to mail-in ballots. Absentee balloting is also cutting into the use of paperless systems. In 2012, for example, roughly 1 in 10 voters who lived in areas that used paperless systems cast absentee ballots. |