Sometimes, the news media and our political leaders make us worry about the wrong things.  A recent Washington Post poll found that 74% of Americans favor requiring voters to show government-issued photo ID. A plurality cares more about voter fraud than the risk that some eligible persons will be denied the right to vote.  The potential for fraud in this year's presidential election is real, but not in the form of voter impersonation. Remember those hackable voting machines that caused trouble in 2000, 2004 and 2008? Well, they're back, and they still have the potential to steal your vote.  "It is highly likely that voting systems will fail in multiple places across the country," says a report by a consortium of non-profits organized to track the problem.  On the other hand, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has looked at some closely analyzed elections and evaluated the risk of somebody impersonating you to cast your vote. That risk, it says, is roughly equivalent to the probability that you'll be struck by lightning.  Meanwhile, the danger that malicious hackers or accidental errors can change your vote is as real as ever. The worst horror story originated in Volusia County, Fla., where a corrupted memory card subtracted 16,000 votes from Al Gore's count in 2000.  Problems have occurred in every election since, and the risk does not discriminate between parties. In 2004, memory limitations on new touch-screen voting machines in Carteret County, N.C., caused 4,500 votes to be lost. There was no way to retrieve them.  In Horry County, S.C., the 2008 GOP presidential primary was disrupted when touch-screen machines failed in 80% of polling places. There was a shortage of backup paper ballots, and confused voters were directed to other precincts. In a Palm Beach, Fla., municipal election last March, a software flaw gave votes to the wrong candidate in the wrong race. It took a court-sanctioned recount to set matters right.  The non-profits trying to drum up awareness in the brief time left before Nov. 6 are Common Cause Education Fund, the Newark Constitutional Litigation Clinic at the Rutgers School of Law, and a newer outfit called the Verified Voting Foundation. They have raised a variety of red flags.  The worst voting machines are strictly digital with no paper backup, and they are still used in at least some counties in 16 states. In those places, your vote goes into a black box with no way for you to tell whether your choices were correctly recorded. Just as bad, there is no independent, auditable trail for a post-election recount.  Among the key battleground states, Virginia, with its 13 electoral votes, has inadequate provisions for post-election auditing, according to the consortium's recent report. And Ohio, with 18 electoral votes, was rated "needs improvement" because it does not have a law requiring post-election audits.  In the swing state of Pennsylvania, most counties use paperless electronic voting equipment, "which makes independent audits impossible."  Some states have improved. In my part of North Carolina, for example, a voter marks a paper ballot, then feeds it into a machine that reads the marks electronically. The paper record is kept in case a recount is needed.  Public debate over possible voter impersonation draws attention away from this problem. The motivation behind the pressure to require voters to show government ID was confirmed with admirable frankness by Mike Turzai, Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. A widely viewed YouTube clip shows him checking off a list of accomplishments to applause at a June meeting of the state's GOP Committee. His list included:  "Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done."  In other words, the Voter ID laws work against the ideal of an unbiased election. People without passports or driver's licenses tend to be some combination of old, poor, or frail, all categories that tend to vote Democratic.  But that kind of bias is at least open and subject to negotiation. Poll taxes, literacy tests and the all-white Democratic primary were once used to keep blacks from voting in the South. The civil rights movement eventually built enough support to overcome them. The new ID laws might someday fall on the same basis.  But hackers, corrupted memory cards and machine failures are much more difficult to see and overcome. Somebody could steal an election, and we'd never know it. Both parties are at risk.  "There is still time to fix the problems," says Pamela Smith, head of the Verified Voting Foundation.  But the hour grows late.  Philip Meyer is professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Check the situation in your state:http://countingvotes.org/
Philip Meyer: Photo IDs don't fight most dangerous threat to fair elections. In every election since 2000, electronic voting has lost votes.