The instruments entrusted with our democracy, in other words, get less scrutiny than our toasters.

The result is a travelling circus of errors, with the same machines and the same problems popping up in state after state, city after city. Norden's report features a case study on Diebold voting machines that malfunctioned during a 2008 election in Humboldt County, California. Officials dug into the problem and discovered that the company had known about it four years earlier.

Earlier this year, election officials in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, ran into trouble with voting machines that froze up and shut down in the middle of taking ballots. After calling around to half a dozen states, Cuyahoga County election director Jane Platten found that several counties in Florida had used the same model of machines and experienced the same issues.

It turns out the vendor knew about the problems but hadn't informed the county, for obvious reasons. As an election official interviewed for Norden's report noted, "Vendors are in the business of selling machines, and often don't have an incentive" to inform customers of problems with their product.

There is a government agency, the Election Assistance Commission, created by the 2002 Help America Vote Act to test these new electronic voting systems. But the commission doesn't attempt to record or resolve problems with machines it has not certified. Since the EAC only began certifying machines in June of 2009, Norden's report found that "approximately 99 percent of U.S. jurisdictions in 2010 will be using equipment that is not certified by the EAC."

Norden's report offers several suggestions for addressing these systemic election problems: increase the power of individual states to monitor voting machines and encourage them to negotiate stronger contracts with vendors. But no matter how thoroughly tested software is, bugs will emerge once the product goes public, be it Microsoft Windows or new voting machines. That's why Norden's best solution is his simplest. Create a robust database where election officials from around the nation can share information, so that at the very least, the same problems don't crop up time and again.

Rather than reject technology, states should embrace it. The web would be a perfect vehicle for sharing videos on how to deal with mechanical problems and uploading patches to fix computer errors. The EAC should sit down with engineers to learn about the best ways to track bugs from one version of the software to the next. Hopefully this kind of collaboration will start immediately. Considering that the turnout during this week's primary was a fraction of what it will be on November 2, the chaos that occurred at many New York precincts might have been just a small preview of what's to come.

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