Boston Globe: It's the computers' turn to mess up elections

I was helping my niece research another topic when I stumbled onto this article in today's Boston Globe. Sorry if it's a dupe (I looked but couldn't find anything)

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/321/business/It_s_the_computers_turn_to_mess_up_elections+.shtml

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By Hiawatha Bray, 11/17/2003

A year before the presidential election, concerned citizens are already crying foul. But nobody's arguing over butterfly ballots or punch cards this time, as they did during the interminable Florida recount of 2000. After all, it's the 21st century now. All future elections will be screwed up with the aid of computers. Various local elections throughout the United States early this month provided worrisome hints of the woes to come.

In Boone County, Ind., a high-tech voting machine counted 144,000 electronic ballots, in a precinct that contained fewer than 19,000 voters. In Fairfax County, Va., a Republican school board candidate lost by a handful of votes, then learned that at least one of the computerized ballot boxes had a glitch that may have subtracted some of her votes. ''It's hard not to think that I have been robbed,'' the irate candidate told The Washington Post.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Replacing punch cards with digital touch screens was supposed to deliver the accuracy we've learned to expect from computers.

Now that you've stopped laughing, you're probably all thinking the same thing. Anybody with a PC knows that computers can be wildly unreliable. What's being done to ensure that computerized voting systems are trustworthy?

Not nearly enough, according to the activists trying to force major modifications in digital voting systems. Bev Harris, author of the book ''Black Box Voting,'' is the godmother of the movement. Harris said she's in favor of computerized voting, but not the way it's usually done. "It's not a computing problem," said Harris. "It's an auditing problem."
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and much, much more

as much attention to this story as I should be, but even I am starting to see an increase in the number of stories. Keep up the good work.

Sometimes I wish I had access to Lexis/Nexis and could do some *real* research on the news.