evidence: Although the technology used in voting continues to evolve, it remains vulnerable to both malicious and unintentional errors. To protect the systems against both, explains Douglas W. Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa and co-author of the book Broken Ballots, election officials need to be able to check and double-check the election’s results. [...] We’ve gotten rid of the punch card and mechanical lever voting machines. Those are now not so ancient history. What we’re left with are two categories of voting machines, both of which were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. Optical scan voting machines are the ones that are closely related to standardized test scoring machines, where you fill in a bubble on the ballot next to the candidate names. Those are, at this point, the most widely used voting technology in the U.S. The other category we have are the direct-recording electronic voting machines. The first of those was actually deployed in the 1970s in Illinois, but the vast expansion in the use of those machines happened after the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002. It’s very clear [that] the authors of the Help America Vote Act anticipated that direct-recording electronic voting machines would become the new normal. But, in fact, they were extraordinarily problematic for security reasons. [...] What other problems do we see with modern voting machines?