Missing The Point
The trib notes that it was human error, and not electronic error that caused problems in Kane county. That is completely missing the point, in general, humans are bad at running complicated machines. When I was at my polling place someone was having trouble with the electronic machine and I heard a judge say, “let me go get the screwdriver, it is with the other machine”. We have a hard enough time running elections without injecting another layer of complexity. These tradeoffs need to be carefully studied _before_ trying it out during an election.
The silver lining is that (at least in cook county) they were doing a trial run with the electronic voting machines, only sticking one or two in each of the precincts. Hopefully they were doing a well formed study on this test case so we can know the effectiveness of these systems for future elections.
For more on election issues, the latest issue of Bruce Schneier’s crypto-gram newsletter has two articles on voting machine security, one on the random nature of elections, and one that I disagree with somewhat on the idea of professional election judges.