It strikes me that for the past eight years there have been two general factions for Democrats when it comes to voting and vote tabulation. Starting in Florida in 2000 we saw the beginning of an eight year period of uncertainty for many citizens who believed that the methods used to collect votes were not transparent and therefore open to fraud. The other faction saw parts of the system as flawed, but overall not susceptible to the kind of manipulation that could turn elections.
I hope that is a fair summary.
For me it comes down to verification. I'm a programmer/analyst by trade and so my specific issues have always been related to testing the validity of results produced by very disparate and new systems.
I saw the surfacing of a phenomenon that I had observed for years - that people trust computers, inherently. It's a computer after all. It can't be wrong.
When I write applications or reports that produce summarized data which affect real-world company decisions, I need to make sure that the results produced are correct. The easiest way to do that is to test against a verified data set. A new report should tie to existing reports.
In elections this is a difficult and ultimately expensive proposition. This is why I'm excited about Minnesota's hand recount of the Franken - Coleman Senate race. The hand recount gives all of us an opportunity to test machine generated results against human generated results. If tallies are wildly different, we can then analyze why. Even if the results are similar, but not the same, we will have a rich set of information to make the process better. Further, in Minnesota we have a very good test environment. It is big enough to produce a detailed comparison set, but not too big as to overwhelm the testers.
There is a danger in all of this, though.
If the results of the two counting methods are different by a wide enough margin, we could end up throwing out a very reasonable system simply because we aren't patient enough to understand the reasons why. Personally, I believe that optical scanning is a fine system. One of the best, in fact. But, implementation can have an impact on results.
I think that there is big news coming out of Minnesota in December. As a Franken fan, this is a biased feeling. Regardless, I'm happy for the opportunity to test the system.