Andrew Cohen has written this piece for the Atlantic, with the subhead: “While the nation fixates on stamping out non-existent voter fraud with photo-ID requirements, the perils of electronic voting go unchallenged.”  It builds upon a new piece in Harper’s on alleged potential for rigging of voting machines (or vote counting machines) in the next election.

Color me extremely skeptical.  I don’t have time for a full discussion now, but here’s my bottom line: what we need in this area—for reasons of public confidence and reliability—is that any voting system produce a paper trail which can be manually counted.  Coupling that paper trail with a mandatory random audit procedure should solve any paranoia about a subtle “red shift” in the electronic voting machinery. The bigger problem, as we recently saw in Florida was incompetence, not chicanery—a post-election audit revealed a misprogramming of the machinery to count optically scanned ballots.