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Some people are thrilled by this fall's election results, with the Democrats back in power in both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years.

Some are very pleased at the level of voter interest and turnout.

I consulted the American University's Center for the Study of the American Electorate and found that voting numbers did, indeed, change quite a bit this year.

The 38 states that had governor and Senate primaries in 2006 saw the lowest voter turnout ever, a measly 15.4 percent. But in the November general elections, a national average of 40 percent of those registered voted -- 83 million people.

In Virginia, we had the biggest increase in voters over since 2002. Statewide, 43.8 percent of those registered came out and voted.

The state with the highest voting rate overall was Minnesota, with 59.2 percent. These numbers sound pretty good, until you realize that in Virginia 56 percent of folks that could have voted didn't bother.

Hey, almost half of voters aren't apathetic!

I know some people were so upset with the rhetoric in this year's race that they didn't vote at all. Others were so angered by the mean-spirited ads that they turned out to vote when they might not have otherwise.

The breakdown of the results was unusual. Webb beat Allen by fewer than 10,000 votes, or less than 1 percent. Proposition 1, the "Marriage Amendment," won by more than 300,000 votes, or 14 percent.

Virginia codes 18.2-344 and 345 already make it illegal for any unmarried people to live together or have consensual sex of any kind and 20-45.2 specifically bans marriage between members of the same sex. Does the state constitution really need to be amended, or was it merely an issue meant to distract voters?

Another aspect of the fall's elections to have mixed feelings about is the preponderance and performance of electronic voting machines. Some news tended to downplay voting machine problems as "glitches" but I would feel a little more strongly about it than that if I had to wait for three hours to vote.

There is no central reporting place for voting machine issues, but the Electronic Freedom Foundation Web site details many of this year's problems. In Sarasota, Fla., more than 18,000 votes for Congress were not recorded at all. In New Jersey, votes for the Republican candidate were not recorded. There were software problems in Virginia that distorted the names of candidates on voting screens. In California, voting machines failed and created long lines and waits. Polls opened late in nine states because of machine problems.

Even when voting machines seem to work, some make it very hard to verify that votes are recorded properly. For instance, Virginia had an extremely close race, but most of its voting machines didn't keep a paper trail. A paper trail would show the voter, while still in the voting booth, exactly what was being recorded as her vote. The paper stays in the machine so there is something to refer to in case of a recount. If Allen had requested a recount, which he was entitled to do, all that could have been recounted was what the electronic voting machines reported.

The voting machines themselves are not necessarily trustworthy. In September, researchers from Princeton published a paper explaining how easy it is to hack a Diebold voting machine. A hacker with as little as one minute's access to the machine could install software causing votes to "flip" from one candidate to another and leave no trace of the changes.

Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey is sponsoring the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, HR 550. If passed, this act would require paper records, random hand-count audits, and a chain of custody that can prove machines and software haven't been tampered with. It would ban voting machines from having wireless and Internet connections. It would prohibit conflicts of interest, such as poll administrators and politicians owning voting machine companies. Hopefully, it will also create some central database of voting issues so in the future it won't be as easy for the national media to make voters feel secure that the only problems were "minor glitches."

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.