Widespread problems were reported with electronic equipment in New Jersey, including Essex County, where machines broke down or failed to start at all in over half the towns and cities. Confusion about emergency paper ballots resulted in many voters being turned away without an opportunity to vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, over 100 machine failures led to at least 43 of the county's 573 polling places either failing to open on time or being unable to use voting equipment. Though many polling places were kept open late, there is no way to determine how many voters were unable to vote as a result of the failures.

In Pennsylvania, thousands of machines failed on Election Day, leading to a call from the state's Republican Party to impound equipment in 27 counties. In Colorado, the poorly designed and untested software running electronic poll books in Denver overloaded, resulting in voters' waiting for hours, with an estimated 20,000 leaving without casting a vote. Voting machines failed at thousands of polling places in over half the states—including entire counties in Indiana and Pennsylvania. The problems caused such severe delays in eight states that the voting hours had to be extended.

Control of the United States Senate depended on the results from Virginia, where the reported margin of victory in a senatorial race was three-tenths of one percent, and a recount was impossible because there was no way to recover voter intent from the electronic tallies.

Voters in 16 states reported that their votes had been recorded for the wrong candidate or did not appear on review screens at the end of the voting process. The latter problem led to the most publicized meltdown, one that could potentially have a great impact on policy in the new Congress—the lost votes in Sarasota County, Florida.

FLORIDA, AGAIN—During early voting in Sarasota County, hundreds of voters reported that their votes in the House race between Vern Buchanan and Christine Jennings simply disappeared from the voting-machine screen. While the election director acknowledged these reports in a memo before the election, she refused to investigate or take the machines out of service. The final results showed that over 13 percent of the county's voters (over 18,000) had not registered any vote in that race. Buchanan's razor-thin, 369-vote margin of victory over Jennings has led to legal action.

Perhaps most revealing is the fact that the Congressional "undervote" among Sarasota County voters who voted absentee—on paper ballots—was less than 3 percent, similar to the rates among all voters in the neighboring counties of the 13th District, who voted entirely on paper ballots. The official results would suggest that of the voters who used touch-screen machines in Sarasota County, more than 16 percent declined to state a preference in one of the most hotly contested Congressional races in the country.

While unconvincing explanations have been proposed to shift blame from the machines to the voters, it seems evident that the votes of many thousands were simply never recorded. There are hundreds of reports from voters who noticed that no vote for either Congressional candidate appeared on the review screen at the end of the voting process. There were presumably thousands more who didn't notice the same.

The results of minimal official testing and audits have supported the winner's claim that one in six of the voters in Sarasota County simply chose not to vote for either candidate. But experts and many Sarasota voters remained unconvinced. The transparency of the election process received a further blow when a circuit court judge, in upholding the "trade secret" protection of the voting system software, ruled that the commercial interests of the voting machine manufacturer superseded the voters' right to know that their votes were counted accurately. The ruling has been appealed.

In the meantime, the debate has shifted from Florida to Washington, D.C. In December, Christine Jennings filed a formal contest of the election, which will be referred to the Committee on House Administration for investigation. Whatever the ultimate outcome, the experience should serve to focus the larger debate about the appropriate use of computerized equipment in the election process.

PAPER TRAILS OR PAPER BALLOTS—In December, a subcommittee of the panel established to draft new voting-system standards, working together with staff from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recommended that those new standards should require voting to be "software independent." The overwhelming sense of the computer science community is that an election process in which the correctness of the results depends solely on software is unacceptable, because there is simply no way to guarantee that the results are correct.

While so-called DRE voting systems (for "direct recording electronic") have been in use in some jurisdictions in the country since the 1980s, their use has increased significantly since 2000. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002 set in motion the most dramatic change in voting technology in the nation's history, with more than a third of American voters using new electronic equipment in 2006, and many states and counties choosing to implement paperless DRE systems. These changes have been accompanied by a growing awareness and concern among citizens about the accuracy and integrity of electronic voting in general and paperless DREs in particular.