16 States Have Districts That Rely Entirely on Glitchy, Paperless Voting Technology

The election is next week, and some of us will be voting on machines that may or may not properly register our selections and will also leave no paper record of any kind that might be used to clear things up in the event of miscast votes. For us, democracy is at the mercy of any possible malfunction.

MIT’s Technology Review flags this breakdown of those states that have entire districts that rely entirely on direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs), the paperless voting technology that has proved controversial in the past:

several states rely on computerized voting machines that don’t print out a paper record that can be verified by voters and recounted by election officials if necessary. Such machines are in use in 16 states, as indicated in red on the map above. Computer scientists and fair-election advocates have warned for years that potential software malfunctions are possible threats to the integrity of elections in counties and states that use these machines.

Here are those 16 states:

Even the U.S. State Department notes that DREs “have unique security concerns and have not been thoroughly tested in the scientific community.” And computer scientists argue that using paper ballots that machines can scan is a much safer route to take—there’s a hard copy if problems arise with the machines—and that it would be just as convenient.

Note that there at least four major swing states that rely on DREs—Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia and Florida. There were only some 1,800 problems reported with DRE machines in 2008, but that’s not altogether insignificant. That’s just the number that was reported, and if some of these critics’ fears are valid, then many voters may never even know if they miscast their ballot. Here, for example, are the results of a 2008 study that found that some states, like Colorado, had major issues with voting tech:

And oh yeah, the margin of polling between the two candidates, is razor thin in these states, and it’s feasible that a few thousand malfunctioning voting booths could make a real difference.

There’s all sorts of screwy goings-on with voter technology being reported already; the company that supplied a significant number of DREs to Ohio is owned by Romney’s former business partners, making more than a few folks uneasy. Other machines, in Kansas, appear to have a glitch where they automatically switch a Romney vote to Obama. And we’re relying on this opaque, malfunction-prone technology to register our votes in 16 states, with no backup. What could go wrong?