Is this true?

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Byrdie714

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I received this email and was wondering if anyone else has received this and what you thought of the message?



"Hi,
This Sunday's cover story in the New York Times
Magazine makes plain the threat: The winner of the
2008 presidential election could be decided by flawed,
insecure, and hackable electronic voting machines.

Congress is poised to consider a new emergency paper
ballots bill next week -- but we'll have to convince
them to act right away.

I signed a petition urging local, state, and federal
officials to require paper ballots for our votes. Can
you join me at the link below?

MoveOn.org Political Action: Paper ballots for the 2008 election

Thanks!"
 
I dont know about other places. But in Ohio the voters can choose between an electronic machine or paper ballots.


It was declared that all Ohio places that have only electronic machines, MUST provide paper ballots as well.
 
From the New York Times Sunday Magazine: Can You Count on Voting Machines?

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”

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I don't read the whole article - it is 10 pages. But you can with the link I think.
 
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