One of America's newest syndicated columnists, Howard Dean, devoted his first column to the dangers of rushing into electronic voting before the kinks are worked out of a system that has already proved faulty.

"Recently, the federal government passed legislation encouraging the use of 'touch screen' voting machines even though they fail to provide a verifiable record that can be used in a recount. Furthermore, this equipment cannot even verify as to whether a voter did indeed cast a ballot for their intended candidate. Unfortunately, this November, as many as 28% of Americans -- 50 million people -- will cast ballots using machines that could produce such unreliable and unverifiable results."

" ... Without any accountability or transparency, even if these machines work, we cannot check whether they are in fact working reliably. The American public should not tolerate the use of paperless e-voting machines until at least the 2006 election, allowing time to prevent ongoing errors and failures with the technology. One way or another, every voter should be able to check that an accurate paper record has been made of their vote before it is recorded."