The New York Times's Tom Zeller, Jr. has an extremely interesting article out tomorrow morning on the relative effectiveness of different voting methods, and a lot of important issues are raised as a result. Zeller writes under the headline "The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy" thusly:

After the pandemonium over dimpled and pregnant chads in the 2000 election, nearly everyone agreed it was time to rethink old vote-counting ways. But the stampede to touch-screen voting was not inevitable.

Another, demonstrably more reliable technology was already on the rise: optical scan voting, introduced in some parts of the country in the late 1970's. By the 2000 election, optical scanning - which involves marking a paper ballot that is ultimately read and counted by a computer - had overtaken all other voting methods as the most common way to vote in the United States. This year, optical scan systems will be used in more than 45 percent of all counties, according to Election Data Services, a political consulting firm in Washington.

He continues:

After the 2000 election, a study by the Voting Technology Project, a joint effort by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a hard look at the nation's voting systems. Using a measure of what they called "residual votes" - overcounting, undercounting or not counting votes for any reason - researchers found that two existing voting methods had produced relatively low error rates in the last four presidential elections: old-fashioned hand-counted paper ballots and optical scan systems.

The study found that the mechanical lever system, which dominated the market in 1980 and has been in decline ever since, performed considerably worse. In overall performance, electronic voting - both the older push-button variety and the newer touch-screen units - performed scarcely better than punch cards (emphasis added).

Regardless of how you feel about this election--whether you want to see George W. Bush or John Kerry reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four years--I think everyone would agree that it's important for as many votes as possible to be counted. The fact is that not every vote will be counted, and in fact even in ideal situations about 2% of the votes won't be counted.

I think people of all political persuasions would agree that it's important to have the best voting methods possible in each election to decrease the possibility of votes not being counted. Accordingly, we must select optical scanning units--rather than touch screen machines--to ensure that the results of our election match the result of our votes.