Riverfront Times has an article on Judith Conoyer, co-founder with Phil Lindsey of Show Me the Vote, the petition drive for a constitutional amendment in Missouri requiring hand-counted paper ballots. The writer lays out the problem with the machines, succinctly and clearly.
Conoyer, a 67-year-old St. Charles resident, co-founded Show Me The Vote in 2005, after becoming suspicious about the reliability of electronic voting machines during the 2004 presidential election. After traveling to Ohio to observe the well-publicized irregularities surrounding the touch-screen machines, Conoyer wondered whether Missouri’s election results were also inaccurate. In St. Charles County, for example, she discovered six precincts reported a voter turnout of more than 100 percent.
You go, Judy! Phil, too!
The dirty little secret of elections is that the machines don’t always count all of the votes.
In Missiouri there is a Uniform Counting Standard [pdf] for counting optical scan ballots which may/or may not have been included in the tabulation.
This reality is usually re-discovered when there is a manual recount in a close race.