I'm touched

No, the problem is, y'see, you're just too dumb to vote.

They didn't put it that way, of course, but that is the clear implication of officials' responses to over 1100 reports of problems with electronic voting machines, including voting for candidate A and having the computer tell you you picked candidate B.

The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.

But there were also several dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touchscreen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.

In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said. ...

[T]he reports did highlight computer scientists' concerns about touchscreens, which they say are prone to tampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts.

However, Alfie Charles, a representative for Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., the company that makes the touchscreen machines used in some Florida counties, said the most likely reason the summary screen showed wrong candidates was because voters pushed the wrong part of the touch screen in the first place.

That is, the machines couldn't be wrong, there couldn't be software glitches, the touchscreen couldn't have been miscalibrated, oh no. It's all because the dumb voters are too stupid even to know what part of the screen they're touching. Even though the problem of misidentified votes "is evidently widespread and may even be relatively common with touch-screen machines," according to Kansas City infoZine for November 2, officials at least initially attributed it to "voter error."

The Election Protection Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.

Even allowing for people who either didn't complain or who didn't know of the Coalition to complain to, the numbers are too small in comparison to the total vote to suggest any pattern of fraud. But they are sufficient to remind us of the possibility and the serious risk of fraud in a close election - as well as to re-emphasize the inherent risks of trusting technology to function without a backup.