E-voting approved in West Virginia

Accupoll is the outfit.

West Virginia officials have approved touch-screen voting machines from AccuPoll Inc. for use in the state.

Touch-screen machines, formally called Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, have become controversial. Some computer scientists and other critics warn that hackers could falsify voting results, or the machines could generate inaccurate results simply through an honest mistake. Such a mistake could go undetected because there would be no other record of votes cast, skeptics warn.

The paper trail has been held up as a solution to that problem. The voter would see a printout and verify that it accurately reflects the vote. Then the paper would be stored and available for a manual recount if needed.

AccuPoll machines generate a voter-verified paper trail. Although many election machine companies are balking at adding printers to generate the records, AccuPoll officials decided to incorporate the feature. Federal elections officials qualified the AccuPoll machines this spring.

"With the latest addition of West Virginia to our list of state certifications, we are now able to sell our equipment to roughly one third of the states across the country," said Dennis Vadura, chief executive officer of AccuPoll, in a statement. "This is just another example of the significant momentum the company has had since our federal qualification just three months ago."

They claim they will provide a hard copy of the voting, an improvement over Diebold. They're apparently good enough for Arkansas and Ohio. I've yet to see any alarmed notice we've got some major swing states trusting e-voting for the November election.

I've googled to look for any problems and checked out Bev Harris' site. I've yet to find any signficant problems with them. However, suffice to say, I'm new to this field so don't swear by me.

Furthermore, since I now consider myself officially jaded about the state of affairs, I keep thinking "if there's a will, there's a way". And we all know that will is mighty strong.