That's the headline ona column I recently wrote for Computerworld. Electronic voting machines without voter-verified paper trails are unreliable, insecure, and don't offer any way to do a recount people can trust if an election is close or tampering is suspected. Even if those systems do work properly, how can we know?
Those of us who vote on paperless machines, whether with touch screens or levers, can never be confident that our votes will be properly submitted, registered and counted. That leaves our elections under perpetual suspicion, whichever candidates prevail.
After Let's Impeach E-voting was published, one information technology professional who also serves as a local election judge wrote me: "I think you'd have to be crazy to trust your vote to an all electronic system with no means of verification."
If you include New York State's lever machines (also no paper trail), some voters in 16 states will be voting on machines that don't have paper ballots or a voter-verified paper audit, according to the Pew Center on the States and some calls we've made to verify current election-technology status. They include four of the seven states Zogby recently listed as "too close to call": Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.