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Media Credit: Associated Press Electronic voting machine.

Media Credit: Associated Press A woman voting on the touch screen electronic voting machine.

Do hackers or technophobes have any place in a political election? In America -- they do. Consider the touch screen electronic voting machine. Hackers have no doubt spent time thinking of how to attack these machines and people afraid of technology are no doubt fearful of having to use them. Did any of the states that purchased these electronic wonders think about these things before they purchased them? Several large states that figure prominently in the election are doing something about these electronic machines -- they put them in storage.

In 2000, national attention focused on Florida’s voting system. Their punch card ballots held up the final count in the presidential election. The final count for Florida was decided by 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and gave the state to George W. Bush. Florida banned the punch card ballots after that.

Now Florida uses electronic voting machines. Concerns abound however, that a preprogrammed memory card could be inserted into the machine to read one candidate’s votes as for another candidate. Different voting technologies are used for machines in Florida. Some use touch screen voting machines in which no paper ballot is involved at all. Other counties are using optical scan machines. With this type of machine, a voter marks a paper ballot with a pencil and the ballot is then scanned much like the system used in high schools for multiple choice tests. Unfortunately, with these types of voting machines, there is no paper trail and no way to audit the ballot counting. Florida has recently banned touch screen machines because the new law passed there requires a verifiable paper trail for all voting machines.

Florida removed their machines to the thanks of many. They sent most of their machines off to be recycled or sold to other countries. California and Ohio have also removed the electronic touch screened voting machines. Some states who removed them are ordering new and improved versions. And in reality, it is only half of the voting machines in the country being removed. Some less significant state could be vulnerable to hackers or fraud. In an election, every state is really important and fraud in any small, insignificant state could still be quite a situation.

Amazing though that half of the country may end up pushing aside a high end piece of equipment such as the electronic touch screened voting machine and replace it with an old-fashioned way of counting votes; just to be safe.

A University at Albany student, Nick Davey also agrees on electronic voting machines being prone to a lot of mistakes. “I wouldn’t trust many electronic machines, there are a lot of bugs in all computer systems.”

A senior at UAlbany, Davey is a computer science major and doesn’t see why they would even use such machines for such an important situation as the election. “It just doesn’t make sense to me, why would they try to use something new for something with such magnitude as the presidential election.”

As any technophobe will tell you, don’t trust technology. That may look like the road the entire country is taking in the 2008 Presidential election. Many of the major states are going back to paper voting and paper ballots again. Some of the states who removed their electronic machines are still worried about paper balloting problems. In Florida’s 2000 election, bits of paper punched from the ballots failed to entirely fall from the ballot, thereby bringing up the question of whether someone had really voted for the candidate in question. Also, without the electronic voting, there can be no electronic counting. Count on these states to count the votes by hand. Wouldn’t you think someone would have invented something safe and technologically advanced by now?

Technology is to blame. In the computer world there are far too many ways that someone can tamper with electronic results and electronic votes being saved on flash memory or memory cards. And who would really know if someone hacked the voting machine? If we can’t know that, how can someone prepare for an attack?

Let’s be honest, if you knew how many people actually try to hack into your personal computer as you sit at home reading this, you wouldn’t trust technology either.

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