Kathryn Ferguson, a spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems, which recently sold touch-screen machines to Palm Beach County, Fla., said that her company's rigorous testing ensured that the voters' choices were correctly recorded. In such a test, a predetermined set of votes are cast -- say, 500 Gore votes and 400 Bush votes -- and if the results show the same set, then you know the system is tabulating correctly.

The system can't be tampered with between the test phase and the election, Ferguson said, because it includes an "event log" that keeps track of everything that's happened to the system.

"And I would ask," Ferguson said, "what did you know before, with older machines? How did you know that those holes you punched in before were read correctly? You didn't know with an optical-scan ballot, either, and you especially didn't know with a paper ballot, because they're the least accurate."

Ferguson is right, obviously -- we learned in Florida that you can't trust punch-card readers, as they seemed to show new results each time they were slipped through the counting machines.

But at least with those machines you had a piece of paper -- one that made sense to human beings -- that could be studied after the election, Mercuri counters. And the technical guts of punch-card and optical-scan systems are much less complex than touch-screens systems, and are therefore less vulnerable to hacks or bugs. When you doubt the results that come from a touch-screen system, Mercuri says, the only way one can determine whether the machine functioned properly is to open it up and test it. And often that's not an option.

Last March, in city elections in Palm Beach, Emil Danciu, a one-time mayor of Boca Raton, finished third in a four-way contest for two of Palm Beach's city council seats. Danciu suggested that some of the votes cast for him had been tallied to other candidates, and he sued for a chance to have the machines inspected. Danciu hired Mercuri as a consultant, and she was able to show county officials that Sequoia's system did seem to have some problems -- for example, when a voter simultaneously touched the names of two candidates, a third candidate's name was highlighted. (A Sequoia representative told the Palm Beach Post that the demonstration was "silly" and "ridiculous.")

Citing Sequoia's right to maintain its trade secrets, however, a judge denied Danciu and Mercuri a chance to inspect the machines.

It was just this sort of outcome that Jason Kitcat had sought to avoid when, as a computer science student in the U.K., he founded Gnu.FREE, a project designed to build an open-source electronic voting system, one whose inner workings were open for all to see.

"I thought that computers could provide a revolution in civilian affairs," he said, "but when I took a look at all the companies in voting, I couldn't believe the state of affairs. Any technology out there was proprietary, and the firms privately held, their finances were unclear, and their technology was secret or protected by patents."

Kitcat spent three years trying to develop an open-source Internet voting system, but the more he toiled, he says, the more he came to realize the impossibility of the task at hand. And now, he says, "I've come to the realization that electronic voting of any type -- even if it's open source -- is a terrible, terrible idea. Very often, technology provides the smokescreen to allow people to steal votes. If you look at the actual voting process, the risks are humongous."

Kitcat and Mercuri are probably in the minority in their views on electronic voting systems; after 2000's election, probably everyone would agree that we need something better than punch cards to determine our elections.

But if 2002's touch-screen elections are challenged, local election officials will likely start asking election companies to change their ways. Already, some vendors say that if asked, they can configure their machines to print out a paper ballot. And Ed Gerck, the CEO of Safevote, a company trying to sell the world on voting via the Internet, says that he has developed a way to "capture" the image of a screen of a touch machine -- which, if it works, would be an innovative way to provide a digital version of a "paper trail."

On the other hand, if everything seems to go right this year, the drive to buy touch-screen machines will likely increase, and little attention will be paid to their possible faults.

"Weirdly, even though politicians live and die by elections," says Kitcat, "they don't seem to be taking much interest between elections to make sure they get these things right. They only worry about it when the chads are hanging or they're pregnant, and when it's not going in their favor."

Recent Stories