Electronic Voting Raises Fears of Glitches, Fraud

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• KWAME HOLMAN:

  In a new major studio movie, Robin Williams plays a marginal presidential candidate who, shockingly, wins, aided by a computer glitch in electronic voting machines.

• CHRISTOPHER WALKEN, Actor:

  Whoops.

• LAURA LINNEY, Actress:

  You're going to be president of the United States.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  Even though no real-life electronic vote fraud has been proven, fear of it seems widespread. Two-thirds of respondents in a recent CNN poll said computer hackers were likely to change vote counts in next week's elections.

  Electronic voting has some people longing for good-old paper ballots, or at least paper verification of their electronic vote.

• VOTER:

  I would feel more confident that my vote would be counted if there was actually a paper trial to verify the vote.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  But even equipping the all-electronic vote machines with paper backups has run into trouble. In Ohio's May primary, 10 percent of those backup paper ballots jammed in the machines or were otherwise unreadable.

• REPORTER:

  What was your reaction when you heard that they weren't working? What did you think?

• VOTER:

  I said, "Here we go again, because they're always messing up."

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  One Ohio voter smashed an electronic voting machine.

  In a state that pioneered electronic voting, Maryland, September primary voters waited for hours just to get to their touch-screen machines because workers forgot to bring the access cards that activate them.

• VOTER:

  I think someone probably needs to lose their job over this.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  And Colorado voters, using electronic voting machines for the first time ever in August, had problems. The result was a lawsuit aimed at decertifying their use in the state.

  But the most serious charge against electronic voting is that it's too vulnerable to tampering, including malicious hacking aimed at changing an election result deliberately.

  REP. DENNIS KUCINICH (D), Ohio: There is such a powerful awareness among the American people about this question of the deficiencies in the technology that it has actually undermined confidence in the election process.