CNN.com has an article that sums up some early evaluations of how various electronic voting machines performed this past election. Here’s an excerpt:

We are not receiving any reports of any huge systematic meltdowns regarding electronic voting, and certainly e-voting seems to have had the same sort of glitches we’ve seen in other paper-based voting systems,” said R. Michael Alvarez, professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology. Alvarez added that many of the problems in 2004 appear to be related to human error, either on the part of voters or poll workers.

“E-voting didn’t pass any test. What we have here is anecdotal evidence. A medical procedure might be safe or dangerous. And just because the patient didn’t die does not mean that the procedure is safe” [Bruce Schneier, security expert and chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security Inc.]. . .

While there were no major meltdowns reported, e-voting watchdogs such as the nonpartisan, nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation posted thousands of complaints on its Web site. It’s impossible to verify all of them independently, but CNN did learn of some incidents where the technology appeared to malfunction.

I still have lots of worries about the potential for e-votes being hacked or otherwise being subjected to fraud but hopefully as paper trails become more common in these e-voting machines, we’ll take more steps toward making the voting process in this country more democratic (small “D").