Voting into the void
New touch-screen voting machines may look spiffy, but some experts say they can't be trusted.

By Farhad Manjoo
Salon.com
Nov. 5, 2002

In mid-September, a few days after yet another problem-ridden election in Florida, Rebecca Mercuri got a phone call from Janet Reno. Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr, wasn't very surprised to hear from the former attorney general; Reno had already been declared the unofficial loser in Florida's Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Mercuri, who during the past two years has become the country's fiercest critic of electronic voting machines, has recently found herself indispensable to losers.

A fast-talking, fact-toting woman who can recount dozens of stories of voting machines going disastrously haywire, Mercuri goes into a region whose election has been held up and proceeds to hold forth. Mercuri tells everyone she can, from election judges to county supervisors to the local media, that the supposedly "state-of-the-art" machines they've all been sold are nothing but a "a bill of goods."

Read Article