, Columnist
When Voting Machines Misbehave
Errors and malfunctions don’t happen often, but they’re common enough to worry computer scientists.
Remember hanging chads?
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Interference by hackers is just one of the nightmare scenarios that worry computer scientists about the upcoming election. The other is a race so close that calling the result is beyond the capacity of today’s voting technology.
Experts who’ve delved into the accuracy of these apparatuses -- from punch cards and mechanical levers to electronic voting machines -- say that no system is perfect. In most cases the error rates are unknown, or are only measured in artificial test settings and not as they would be used in the real world.