There’s a good piece in this week’s Economist (link available to paying subscribers only) about the growing e-voting mess. The magazine focuses on the chaotic way that this ‘improvement’ is being introduced and what is, perhaps, these systems’ greatest flaw – the absence of paper receipts. The writer notes that California has become the first state to insist that all voting machines must produce a paper trail by 2006. But, as he goes on to say, “the debate is far from over. To begin with, some electoral officials oppose the idea of paper trails on the basis that printers will be too expensive, or they might jam. This strikes Rebecca Mercuri, an electronic-voting expert at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, as an odd argument: after all Diebold and other voting-machine manufacturers also make cash registers and ATMs, and they seem to work.[A Corner reader also points to the OTB’s system as another precedent.]

“Another objection is that voters might walk off with the paper ballots. Dr Mercuri’s preferred solution is that voters should be able to see the paper ballot under glass to verify it, after which it drops into the ballot box. Another option would be to use paper forms that voters place under optical readers, which would confirm their choice before the form is placed in the ballot box. The counting is automated, in other words, but not the voting.

“It is hardly rocket science. But it is too late to sort out the mess before November, when perhaps 20% of the votes will be cast using paperless touch-screen machines. Worries over their reliability and security, and the lack of a common standard, mean the new machines may have made a Florida-like fiasco more rather than less likely. “We’re going to have digital hanging chads,” says Dr Mercuri.”

Someone needs to get worried about this – and quickly.