Oooh yes, touch me there!

Updated The arguments of those being called Luddites just keep getting more persuasive.

West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP, October 13) - A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability.

The incident in Palm Beach County - which is infamous for its hanging and pregnant chads during the 2000 presidential election - did not directly involve the touch-screen terminals on which nearly one in three U.S. voters will cast ballots on Election Day.

But critics of the ATM-like machines said it proved how fickle any computer-based voting system can be and highlighted the need for touch-screens to produce paper records.

Tuesday's public dry run had to be postponed until Friday because excessive heat caused a computer server that tabulates data from the touch-screen machines to crash, said county elections supervisor Theresa LePore. ...

She said she suspected Hurricane Jeanne, which struck in September, may have zapped electricity and air conditioning to the room where the server was stored, causing temperatures to soar to 90 degrees or more. ...

The incident raised questions in the minds of computer hardware and software engineers about the reliability of other computers on which Floridians will depend for an accurate vote count on Nov. 2 - especially touch-screen machines. ...

According to technical standards for electronic voting systems, updated in 2002, voting machines must be able to tolerate storage temperatures ranging from minus 4 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. They must be able to operate in "natural" conditions and temperatures ranging from 50 to 95 degrees.

Those standards aren't satisfactory to Vincent Lipsio, a firmware design engineer in Gainesville, Fla. ...

"Conceptually, the whole electronic voting thing is now so far from what I think is acceptable that I would never vote for it, if I had the choice," Lipsio said. "These standards aren't any more mission critical than your average video game."

And the issue, it's worth pointing out yet again, is that in at least many of the touchscreen systems the vote tally is essentially in the hands of the computer, with no way to check it for failures, system bugs, tampering, or any other problem. I can't help but wonder why the persistent resistance to a voter-verified receipt printed out by the computer which could then be deposited in a lock box (just like a paper ballot) and used to do a hand recount in the event of a problem or a challenge.

A conspiracy to manipulate the count is certainly possible on a local or even county scale, and that could be enough to swing a state and that could be enough to swing a national election. But actually manipulating a national election in that way would be extremely difficult because you'd be just guessing which precincts would matter. And manipulating the national vote directly would be even harder. But again, deliberate manipulation is not the only issue. In that light, the only reasons I can see for the rejection of receipts are a refusal by the companies that make the buggers and the states that bought them to admit a mistake and/or a blind, even religious, faith in the technology. Neither of those possibilities are at all comforting.

Updated to correct a confusing grammatical error.