Wow, let me see if I can address some of the questions here. This topic is a big part of what I do for a living...

Why not vote on the Internet? mlord sums up one significant objection: evil malware on the voting terminal could show one thing while doing another. A second objection is that somebody could watch over you shoulder while you vote, thus voiding your privacy and enabling voter coercion / bribery. Estonia tried to address this by letting you vote multiple times, with only the last one counting. That means that there's a big database somewhere that has your name next to your vote. Not reassuring. Also, you authenticate via your national ID card (a smartcard thing). Somebody could watch you vote then "borrow" your card until the election is over.

Sophisticated "end-to-end" cryptographic techniques can work around the malware platform issue, but cannot do anything about the coercion issue. See, for example, Helios.

(We're using similar crypto machinery in our VoteBox voting system, which appears more like a "standard" electronic voting machine.)

Is the media following this issue? My phone seems to be ringing off the hook. I was on NPR Science Friday last week. I'll be on several other radio stations this week. The press is definitely covering the issue. Of course, it's not the #1 problem these days.

So what about this UI problem? Surely it can't be that hard to do? Actually, it can, because we're not dealing with "normal" computer users. We're dealing with every registered voter, which means older people who don't use computers and illiterate people and non-native speakers, and on and on.

The current, most likely culprit, particularly notably in West Virginia for some reason, is typically misnamed "vote flipping", and is really the result of touch-screen calibration issues. If you hit what you think is the proper area for your candidate and it selects the one above, you (computer geek, reader of this board) will simply aim lower and try again, knowing that you're compensating for a bogus calibration. A non-trivial percentage of voters won't know to do that.