I went to early voting last week, and as I expected, my county is using electronic voting machines now. They went with the iVotronic prodcut, which is essentially a large, tablet device with a touch screen interface.
I complain a lot about electronic voting machines but I gather that my complaints are a bit different then what I typically see in the press. The switch from punch-cards to computers doesn't bother me at all -- I think it's perfectly feasible to design a robust electronic voting system. If designed well, a networked system should enable rapid and secure vote counting. What I don't like is that the systems are being designed behind closed doors. On the iVotronic product page they claim it as a feature to be a "Proprietary Personal Electronic Ballot device." WTF!?? I don't want a "proprietary" voting device. I want a voting device that is open to review by the thousands of software, hardware, and security experts in this country! The FUD wielders will preach that an open system will enable Crackers to attack it's weaknesses; and when you hear this argument you should turn it around and mention that obscuring weaknesses by not disclosing them ensures that such weaknesses remain in the system!
At a Halloween party over the weekend the topic of Voting and the electronic machines came up when someone mentioned that they had a problem with the system when trying to vote Democratic. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but have you noticed that all the jokes about voting machines manipulating votes revolve around making Democratic votes difficult? Does that seem odd to you? I mean, people are out-right joking about Republican corruption influencing votes, yet no one really takes it seriously.
To compound the issue, Slashdot posted a link to a research paper titled, "Small vote manipulations can swing elections" which takes a mathematical view at the minimal amount of errors required in vote counting to skew an election.