Physical Evidence of Electronic Voting Errors

Slashdot is reporting on a Princeton Professor who has shown conclusively that some electronic voting machines make some basic errors when tallying votes. The Professor, Ed Felton, has a blog which details his findings.

Before we dig into the details, let’s review some background. At the end of Election Day, each Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine prints a “summary tape” (or “results report”) that lists (among other things) the number of votes cast for each candidate on that machine, and the total voter turnout (number of votes cast) in each party. In the Super Tuesday primary, a few dozen machines in New Jersey showed discrepancies in which the number of votes recorded for candidates in one party exceeded the voter turnout in that party. For example, the vote totals section of a tape might show 61 total votes for Republican candidates, while the turnout section of the same tape shows only 60 Republican voters. - Freedom to Tinker

We're lucky that here in Virginia, Gov. Kaine signed Sen. Herring's ballot audit bill into law. That bill at least shows a willingness here in Virginia to codify a paper trail for all votes, if not actually implementing one (yet).

At every turn, the issue of voting itself is becoming important in our 2008 campaign.