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Yet another snafu in the seemingly futile pursuit of a reliable electronic voting machine occurred last week when Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California.

Wired reports that when the machine was switched over to its Spanish language interface, it failed to record votes for two propositions. It seems that Sequoia's programmers certified the machine for the test without having confirmed that all of its options had been appropriately configured.

"...The paper trail worked flawlessly, but it caught a mistake in the programming of the touch-screen machine itself. For some reason it would not record or display the votes on the Spanish ballot for these two ballot measures. The only reason we even caught it was because we were looking at the paper trail to verify it."

E-voting machines are notoriously unreliable. Their use has cast doubt over elections in California, Virginia, Texas, Florida and Georgia.

In California, the 2002 Alameda County elections were compromised by the use of Diebold voting machines that had been tampered with by Diebold employees after certification by election officials. The machines were not re-certified before the election where hundreds of votes were allegedly lost. The 2004 Napa primary was marred when over 6,000 votes were lost or miscounted.

Last November, voting machines by Advanced Voting Solutions were plagued by problems in Virginia, including a problem resulting in lost votes for one candidate in a close county election.

The 2003 election results in Houston were skewed when several eSlate voting machines malfunctioned and others were misconfigured by poorly trained workers. The machines presented some people with the wrong ballots, allowed others to cast two votes and ultimately forced election officials in at least one polling place to use torn scrap paper for ballots.

In the 2000 election, Diebold machines subtracted votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Florida. The media had already called the race for George Bush before anyone noticed the odd -16022 votes for Gore in a precinct where 412 people actually voted. In an election that turned on some 537 votes, a miscount of tens of thousands may have occurred, leaving no record behind.

To Florida's further embarrassment in 2002, machines made by Election Systems & Software erroneously reported that in several Florida precincts no one had voted for governor.

The Georgia 2002 elections were a fiasco, where Diebold voting machines were used without prior certification by election officials and allegedly registered votes that were cast for Democrats as votes for their Republican opponents.

In most cases, there is no reliable way to independently verify the machine's count.

The response to these problems has been varied. The Legislature and the Secretary of State in California have taken steps to promote the use of a paper-trail to facilitate recounts. The state of Maryland commissioned a report [PDF] on the security of Diebold voting machines that isolated 328 security weaknesses, 28 of which were considered critical. Nevertheless, Maryland will use those electronic voting machines in the upcoming November General Election. The Secretary of State in Florida recently won a court battle where opponents sought to force the use of a paper audit trail. In both Florida and Georgia, state officials have declared that electronic ballots are not to be recounted in the event of a recount.

Grassroots organizations such as Black Box Voting and Verified Voting are campaigning across the nation to replace "black box voting machines" that present unverifiable election results with secure machines that permit a paper audit.

The only way to be reasonably certain that your vote counts in the upcoming election is to use a paper ballot or to vote by absentee ballot. Contact your local Board of Elections or League of Women Voters office for more information about your voting options.

For detailed e-voting stories, click on the following links:
Kim Zetter, "How E-Voting Threatens Democracy," Wired News, Mar 29, 2004.
Scott Granneman, "Electronic Voting Debacle," SecurityFocus, Nov 12, 2003.
Farhad Manjoo, "Voting into the void," Salon, Nov 5, 2002.

Check out this story on C|Net:
http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/E-voting+critic+calls+on+hackers+to+expose+flaws/2100-1028_3-5289146.html