No reason it couldn't Ebbie -- but the only truly reliable path is to ensure a secure set of paper votes is kept by each machine so that in the event of a conflict some evidence can be reached for that has not been electronically tampered with. If you wait til the end of the day for the votes to be printed you have hours of possible hacks.

The ideal system would (a) capture the vote electronically and get the voter to confirm it was his intended vote (b)make an internal hard copy in case recount was needed and offer a hard copy to the voter (c)keep the electronic tally in some way that was as bulletproof as possible (d) do all of this with as sturdy a guarantee as possible of privacy, i.e. not linking the identity of the vote to the voter once he leaves the voting booth.

Not a simple equation but not undoable, either. The reason Diebold and Co is in trouble over their products is because they ignored best practices that have been in place in large software system development groups for years -- just ignored them for the sake of speed and ROI. From what I have seen their requirements management, configuration management, test planning, white-box and black-box testing and version control are all very slipshod and not disciplined at all. There's no sign they held a formal design review before going to code or traced their requirements to their test procedures in any way in what I have seen.

If this impression is correct they're not true engineers, just bright-eyed little hackers, and should not be trifling with democratic process.

A