E-Voting Next Tuesday: Electoral Catastrophe?

We could have a demoractic crisis next Tuesay if significant numbers of elections are contested because of e-voting glitches. Candidates will be challenging election results in the courts leading to a mess that makes Florida 2000 look like a picnic:

Next week, 4 out of 5 voters across America will use touch-screen machines or optical scanners to cast their ballots. More than one-third of the electorate will vote electronically for the first time, raising questions about whether voters, machines, and poll workers are up to the task.

Electionline.org Director Doug Chapin found half the states that made the switch to machines did so in the past two years – potentially increasing the chance of mishaps.
Connecticut, for example, will be using optical scanners in 25 towns for the first time on Election Day.

Lets hope they use power strips:

“If the systems go down because of something like a power outage or a power surge or a glitch, it’s very possible that event would cause the hard discs and the flashcards inside of them to fail,” Rubin says.

What are the qualifications of the poll workers:

“The concern with new technology is not so much whether the machines work, but whether the people operating them can make them work,” Chapin says. “We've seen problems across the country with poll workers have trouble getting machines started, getting results out of them at the end of the day, with voters having trouble making their selections or verifying that their selections are correct.”

Past problems:

Many states do not require a paper record from the machines, making recounts slow and almost impossible. Other problems in recent primary elections included miscounts, frozen machines, and missing memory cards.

No paper trail:

Only 27 states have laws requiring the use of voter-verified paper trails in electronic machines. Eight more states utilize a paper trail in their machines but don't require it, leaving 15 states with no mandated requirements for safeguarding your vote. But with no national law in place, our midterm elections are being threatened by a system lacking any real regulation and standards.

An example of what's to come:

The recent primary elections in Montgomery County, Maryland, also highlighted just how unprepared many polling places are for the midterms. The state election administrator is demanding to know what went wrong after election workers did not receive access cards to operate the Diebold voting machines for the county's 238 precincts on time, forcing as many as 12,000 voters to use provisional paper ballots that ran out quickly. Some were simply told to come back later and vote.

An then there is the threat of a computer virus:

Princeton researchers found that "malicious software" running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little, if any, risk of detection, and that anyone with access can install the software. The study also suggests these machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses. Diebold says the unit used in the test was two generations old and to its knowledge is not used anywhere in the country.

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Inept government in Afghanistan as in Iraq:

A recent Central Intelligence Agency assessment found that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, had been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with his American-backed government...

The assessment found that Mr. Karzai’s government and security forces continued to struggle to exert authority beyond Kabul, said a senior American official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The assessment also found that increasing numbers of Afghans viewed Mr. Karzai’s government as corrupt, failing to deliver promised reconstruction and too weak to protect the country from rising Taliban attacks.

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Rumsfeld obviously didn't get this report:

The U.S. government conducted a series of secret war games in 1999 that anticipated an invasion of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, and even then chaos might ensue.