The researchers cannot explain the 3 percent rate for electronic machines, which are often compared to ATMs. But they speculate it could be related to voter confusion caused by design flaws or a lack of familiarity with the technology. But some of them need more work, he said, a sentiment echoed last week by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris when she recommended the state move cautiously toward electronic voting. One company, Sequoia, has taken the Caltech-MIT study to task, saying the methodology was flawed and the results inconsistent with elections using Sequoia equipment. In the presidential election, for example, the number of undervotes in Riverside County's touch-screen system was less than 1 percent.
Sequoia executives plan to meet with the researchers soon.
But another company, UniLect, concedes that some voters on Nov. 7 were confused by the prompts on its touch screen. In one precinct, said UniLect president Jack Gerbel, it was apparent that some people touched the screen for a presidential candidate then mistakenly canceled their votes by pressing the name a second time. Across Burke County, where the precincts go by names like Smokey Creek, Upper Fork and Jonas Ridge, the undervote rate was 3 percent. Gerbel conceded that was high, but added the problem will be corrected easily with a warning affixed to voting booths. Hart InterCivic's electronic voting machine offers a prompt at the end of the ballot to tell voters when they miss a race, a feature that cuts down on undervoting.