Check out these two stories from Wired discussing potential problems with electronic voting systems, particularly the touch screen models, which don't provide any audit trail for vote verification.
The problems here should be immediately obvious. If there's no paper trail, how do you do a recount? How do you check the validity of your voting data? How can voters be sure that their vote is properly recorded? The answer is that you can't.
Other issues include security and source code validation. Since the manufacturers won't even let the states examine the internals of the machines, there is still no way to verify that the machines do what they claim. Given past problems with e-voting, this isn't mere paranoia.
Posted by Chris at April 5, 2004 01:05 PM