Touch-screen test

NEW VOTING MACHINES, like new computers, are generally faster than old ones. But as every computer user knows, reliability is often more important than speed. And a lot depends on who’s using the machine and how.

After the debacle with punch-card ballots in Florida six years ago, many counties across the country traded in their clunky old voting machines for high-tech models — many of which enable people to vote just by touching names on a video screen. The switch, however, has drawn a new set of complaints. Some poll workers and computer scientists predict an election day plagued by long waits, glitches and miscounted votes. A more promising possibility is that, with the right equipment and procedures in place, electronic voting machines will deliver an unusually accurate and speedy count.

Unfortunately, the experience this election day is sure to fall somewhere in between. A number of states lack the safeguards necessary to address the machines’ vulnerabilities to glitches and tampering. And even in states with those safeguards, such as California, the integrity of the results will depend on voters taking extra steps to make sure everything works as it should.

So far, the most common complaint about the electronic voting devices is that they break down or freeze too often, which is an engineering problem (and one hardly new to computer users). More troubling are the reports that some of the devices have inexplicably tallied the occasional vote for the wrong candidate. Computer experts also have demonstrated how easy it is to rig a machine’s software (or hardware) to steal votes.

These problems highlight the need for machines to print and store a record of each vote as it is cast. Manufacturers have resisted putting printers in their machines, and only a portion of the states where the machines are being deployed have insisted on a paper trail. One of them is California, where 32 of the 58 counties will make routine use of the new machines on election day. (In Los Angeles County, voters mark paper ballots that are counted by optical scanners.)

The machines will require voters and election officials to change their habits. The machines let voters check their ballot on a summary screen before it is cast, so they can correct any vote that somehow winds up in the wrong candidate’s column. But voters also have to check the paper record before they leave the booth to preserve the accuracy of that record for a recount. Meanwhile, election officials need to keep a tighter lid on voting cards and other equipment. And after the polls close, random audits must be thorough enough to guard against software tampering.

Together, these steps can help deliver the improvements in accuracy that the new technology promises while minimizing the risks of software tampering and bugs. Now if only the manufacturers could develop machines that don’t crash.