An impending voting fiasco?

I wrote earlier about the well-documented problems with the new electronic voting machines. Some argue that these machines are flawless. They contend that anyone who asks questions is nothing more than a liberal, Bush-hating ideologue looking for reasons to whine. Ad hominem against anyone who dares question the status quo is the modus operandi of those presently in power and their apologists.

(Sorry for so many Latin phrases in one sentence)

However, the latest concerns about the accuracy of these voting machines comes not from some left-wing advocacy group but from the staid pro-business magazine The Economist.

The widely respected weekly expressed fears that the 'wrong kind of voting machine could bring chaos to the mid-term elections.'

The problem is not a vast conspiracy but simple accuracy.

A thermal printer to produce a record is available as an added extra on some touch-screen machines. But when these were tried out, as they have been across the country in primary elections in the past few months, the results were not encouraging. If the paper is put in wrongly, the printer does not print at all. Even when it was the right way round, there were many cases of the paper jamming, tearing or producing unreadable results. The fact that most election officials are unpaid volunteers, very often elderly and with little or no training, also caused difficulties. At any rate, with a touch-screen system the paper-trail is produced by the machine, and so is only as good as the machine. And the machines, it also turns out, may be vulnerable to tampering.
In September three scientists at Princeton University got hold of the most popular touch-screen model and took it and its software to bits.

They found serious flaws allowing a competent hacker to infect the machine with a program to transfer votes from one candidate to another.

Such a change could be undetectable without a recount (assuming one were possible), and the program could be introduced into the machine far in advance by anyone having access to the machine's memory-card reader for as little as a minute. The readers are protected by a lock, but the lock is a standard one, and keys can be bought on the internet:

Furthermore

[Some] of the problems occurred not with the voting machines but with other terminals, designed to ensure that people are entitled to vote and have not voted twice.) Elsewhere, there have been horror stories of votes failing to register or upload, of memory-cards going missing, and of machines crashing and losing stored votes. Only a few such cases can damage confidence badly: and crashes, at the least, cause huge delays.

Do you necessarily have to be a Democrat or a progressive to be concerned about the integrity of the most basic procedure in an electoral democracy?

The solutions, according to the weekly are very simple.

[A] wholesale switch to paper ballots and optical scanners; more training for election officials; and open access to machine software. But it is too late for any of that this time--and that is a scandal.