The Register has highlighted not one but two potential information quality problems with the ballots being cast in the pre-Presidential primaries in the US.

Firstly, Democrats Abroad decided to support Democrats living overseas by letting them vote on-line. This sounds like an excellent idea, this ‘electronic voting’. However, there seem to have been some concerns with the way the ballot was conducted. Apparently the ‘receipt’ that was produced to evidence the voter’s choice just showed the choice, with no other reference that could be used to support an audit. And to cap things off, when one voter tried to print her ‘receipt’ all she got was a blank sheet of paper.

David Dill and Barbara Simons are two experts in the field who wrote a nice piece on this precise risk on Monday over on www.news.com

Of course, it’s not just internet voting that is all a-jitter. With electronic voting being a much used technology in the US, it was timely that a report was issued by two voting advocacy groups that highlighted that six of the twenty four (25%) States are at high risk of malfunction of or tampering with their e-voting machines , with a further 5  States being at medium risk. That’s almost 50%.

Sheesh. It’s a good job that the stakes are so low with that level of risk in the process and with the audit trails not really being audit trails and the receipts printing out blank.

It is, after all, only a race for the Presidency of the United States. Surely the expectation of accuracy and completeness in those ballot counts will be low?