How and whether your vote will be counted, well, I'm not sure what those odds are. For there are many legitimate, non-partisan reasons to be concerned about flaws in electronic voting machines adversely impacting elections.
I don't say this in a paranoid, "there's a plot to steal the election" kind of way. I say it in a "I've been around techology long enough to know it's far from perfect" kind of way.
Over at BusinessWeekOnline -- not exactly known as a bastion of left-wing conspiracy theorists -- columnist and author Avi Rubin lays out several logical reasons why electronic voting may not be ready for prime time:
If wringing the bugs out of the systems were my main concern, I would be optimistic about the future of electronic voting. After all, eventually we could produce a stable system. Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit.
Regarding transparency, Rubin says, "There is no way to observe the counting of the votes publicly, and you can't even tell if the votes are being recorded correctly." He's absolutely right.
His second reason involves something IT managers face constantly -- crashing equipment. A power outage, a corrupted file, malicious code -- all unanticipated disasters that could wipe out votes and render them unrecoverable.
On the last point, Rubin argues:
Finally, and I believe most seriously, there is no way to independently audit a fully electronic voting system. While it is true that many of the machines keep multiple copies of the votes, these copies are not independent.
My opinion: If elections are so important in this country, we can afford to spring for a little sheet of paper for each voter to serve as a voting receipt. And while I'm at it, let's boost turnout by either making election day a national holiday or by allowing voting at the polls to be spread over two or three days.
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