A few isolated incidents? Or the beginning of a steady stream of reports? Note that in the third link, it's a county that heavily favored John Kerry. Not counting votes accurately is not counting votes accurately, regardless of who it helps.
There's no evidence of any kind of widespread fraud in the election and therefore no reason to give any credence to loony conspiracy theories. But we still have electronic voting machines that are insecure, unreliable, and wide open to fraud. And we have a number of non-technical problems that we're still failing to address - registration, polling place lines, and ballot design.
This article says it best:
What worries voting reformers more is that Congress, the White House and the states will see the lack of a 2004 election meltdown as vindication of America's voting system and neglect the tools of democracy another four years.
"There's a huge danger," said Ted Selker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
"If you're an election official, it's going to be very hard to go to Congress and say we need more money," said Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearing house for voting reform information. "What they could say is we need to finish the job we started."
Now that election-year pressure is off, will a sharply divided nation forget about shoring up voting systems poorly suited for sharp divisions?
Voting reformists are crossing their fingers and hoping not.
"Is the testing of voting machines satisfactory?" asked Selker. "No. Are the design standards appropriate? No. Are they all improving? Yes. But do we have good mechanisms for improving them? No."
Beyond those issues, the Elections Assistance Commission needs to find the best way to count provisional ballots, develop reliable registration databases and verify electronic votes.
