California's top election official may decide today to scrap the state's electronic voting system because of fears over the reliability of new touch-screen voting.
The main problem is that current touch-screen machines do not provide a paper ballot and can not accurately be audited, said Ms Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century.
During the 2000 presidential election, 16,000 negative or minus votes temporarily showed up for Mr Al Gore in Volusia County, Florida, on optical-scan voting machines, prompting the TV networks to prematurely call the election for president George W. Bush, Ms Harris said.
Last week a state panel looking into glitches the e-voting system recommended California should not use it and as a result California Secretary of State, Mr Kevin Shelley, could decide to scrap all electronic voting for now.
Some experts fear that electronic voting will bring potential problems in the November presidential election with no way to recount ballots accurately.
"If there is any question about who wins an election, there will be no way with most of these electronic systems to go back and determine the original voter intent," said Ms Linda Franz of Citizens for Voting Integrity in Washington state.
"We may have nostalgia for the hanging chads," said Ms Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. The author of the first report critical of touch-screen voting system security, Ms Rubin was referring to the bits of paper associated with the ageing system of punch-card ballots used in the contested 2000 presidential election.
Optical-scan machines in which computers read ballots with filled-in bubbles are more reliable because the paper ballot can be used in a recount, she said.