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It appears that some electronic voting machines are throwing votes to Bush/Cheney because it is the default selection. Users who have, on a previous screen, selected to vote a straight ticket might not realize that the machine is about to ignore that choice. It’s a human-factors issue, but a grave one.

To put this even more succinctly, imagine the presidential ballot as a
Windows or Mac dialog box, in which one button (ideally the “safe
choice” from the user’s standpoint) is commonly selected as the
default:

The safe choice, indeed.