If David Boies and Jesse Jackson routinely seek to overturn election losses by their favored candidates, and the courts allow this foolishness to continue, then plaintiffs will have plenty of ammunition to undermine just about any technological fix that you can imagine. Typically, a voter uses an ink pen to fill in the bubble next to the name of the preferred candidate. However, if the pen is running out of ink or has been dipped in water to keep it from drying out, the machine may not be able to read the vote. Touch-screen machines . If the machine fails, there's no paper backup to audit the results.
Electronic systems can also be vulnerable to tampering.
Online voting . Many information technology companies are pushing the idea of e-voting, but of course it has its limits as well. Servers can crash, and again, there's no paper backup. Viruses could affect the accurate transmission of votes. In a recent test of e-voting, the 2000 Democratic primary in Arizona gave people the option of voting online.