The transition to touch-screen machines in Georgia was proposed and championed by Democrats, and the state's elected Democrats remain the machines' fiercest defenders. It is an irony of this story, then, that while Roxanne Jekot and her friends claim that Republicans rigged the 2002 election, it is for Democrats -- or, for one Democrat in particular, Georgia's secretary of state, Cathy Cox -- that they reserve their contempt. Cox, a former journalist and attorney who was first elected to office in 1998, is the nation's leading proponent of electronic voting systems. After the 2000 election, Cox grasped, long before her peers in other states, that electronic voting would be the future of elections. It was a future that she was determined to bring to her state.

Georgia has 159 counties, more than any state except Texas, and, before the new machines were installed, there were nearly as many different voting systems in use -- old-school lever machines (which also produce no paper trail), punch-card machines, and optical scan systems (which use SAT-style fill-in-the-bubble ballots), all of varying makes and models. Shortly after the 2000 election, Cox commissioned a study on the accuracy of these systems, looking at one measure in particular, the presidential-race undervote. (The undervote in a given race is the number of ballots on which voters failed to register any choice for a candidate.) Cox found that the highest undervote rates occurred in neighborhoods where there were large groups of minorities.

In a sample of predominantly black precincts Cox examined, for instance, she found that the undervote was an alarming 8.1 percent. What was mysterious was that optical scan voting systems -- which are really the only alternative to touch-screen machines still available for sale -- did not seem to greatly improve the undervote rate among minorities. While the undervote rate on optical scan machines in white neighborhoods was just 2.2 percent, in black neighborhoods it was 7.6 percent. The situation in Georgia was so obviously discriminatory that in 2001, the ACLU sued Cox to force her to upgrade the state's elections systems. Cox says that she chose touch-screen systems because, among other attributes, they had the best chance of reducing the undervote. She was right: In the 2002 election, using the new machines, the undervote rate in Georgia was less than 1 percent.

In the online forums where voting-machine critics assert that Republicans fixed the 2002 election in Georgia, it's often said that the results in the state surprised everybody. This isn't exactly the case. The Senate race, which pitted the incumbent Democrat Max Cleland against Saxby Chambliss, a Republican, was widely considered a tossup by Election Day.

The big surprise, perhaps the largest upset anywhere in the country that night, was in the governor's race. Roy Barnes had been all but assured a win. He had everything on his side, including money (Barnes outspent Sonny Perdue by a margin of 6 to 1), history (Georgia is the only state in the nation that did not elect a Republican governor in all of the 20th century) and a commanding lead in the polls.

But when Barnes eventually lost (with 46 percent to Perdue's 51 percent), his campaign did not suspect the voting machines, not even for a second. According to Bobby Kahn, Barnes' chief of staff and an old-time political hand in Georgia, there was an obvious political reason for the defeat -- the Confederate flag. In an e-mail, Roy Barnes wrote that "you will see that the dominant factor in my defeat in 2002 was anger over my actions in changing the Georgia flag to reduce the size of the Confederate battle emblem. I knew from my travels around the state that there was a lot of anger over the change -- I had believed, or at least hoped, I could overcome the anger, but I couldn't." Voter turnout among white Georgians in 2002 was unexpectedly high, much higher than in the 1998 race.

In his office this fall, Chris Riggall, Cox's press secretary, said that many of the computer scientists who have questioned electronic voting systems have little firsthand experience in elections, and are therefore unqualified to judge a voting system's security. And those who say there was something amiss with the 2002 election don't have a clue about how politics works in Georgia, he said. "When I see the Independent" -- the London newspaper -- "saying the only way Max Cleland could have lost was because of the voting machines, I have to laugh. What in the hell do you know about Georgia political history? The last time he won with [just] 30,000 votes!"

"Our system is not perfect," says Riggall. "Our system is vulnerable, but we believe it's less so than all of the alternatives. So our frustration is the lack of context, perspective and knowledge of what happens in Georgia."

But the movement to challenge electronic voting is not confined to Georgia, or to those who worry about the 2002 election results. David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, has been among the one or two activists most responsible for the shift. Dill says that when he first heard that systems were being installed in Georgia and in some of California's largest counties -- including his own, Santa Clara -- he initially figured "that somebody was minding the store and making sure that the equipment is somehow trustworthy."

Then he did some research into how the systems were designed and implemented, and "I began to feel that maybe that wasn't true," he says. Dill says that he was particularly annoyed that election officials seemed to ignore the concerns of computer security experts, who've warned of the dangers of electronic voting for decades. So early in 2003, Dill posted a petition online demanding that all computerized voting equipment produce what he called a "voter-verifiable audit trail."

The audit trail (an idea that was first developed by Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist who has long studied the voting systems and is now a research fellow studying transparency in computational systems at Harvard's Kennedy School) works as follows: When a voter casts a ballot on a touch-screen machine, she'll be presented with a paper version of her votes to look over. Once she approves this paper ballot, it becomes the official record of her vote (she is not allowed to remove the paper ballot from the voting precinct). If there is a question about the accuracy of the electronic count, election officials would be required to manually count the paper ballots; if there's a discrepancy between the two counts, the manual count would be considered the official result of the election. Thousands of computer scientists have signed Dill's demand; attaining it nationally has become the paramount goal for the critics of the touch-screen systems.

"It's not just one computer scientist whining about this," Dill says. "It's a lot of very reputable people who are willing to say that as far as they can see this voter-verifiable audit trail idea is the only way you can conceive the necessary level of confidence in the equipment."

Kevin Shelley's decision, in late November, to require a paper trail in California's electronic voting machines was gutsy -- and some say precipitous. No paper-equipped touch-screen system has ever been used in a real election in the state, and a few election experts have expressed serious concerns about the viability of such a machine. Ted Selker, a computer scientist at MIT who has studied election procedures, fears that the paper trail would be prone to accidents and attacks: Paper ballots are tricky to count accurately by machine, are almost impossible and time-consuming to count by hand, and, of course, they can easily be tampered with. It's not clear how the paper ballots would be made accessible to the blind, either, and nobody knows how much upgrading to the paper system would cost. Selker, who worked on a landmark study of the 2000 election, says that millions of votes each year are lost because of faulty registration databases, flawed ballot design, and poorly trained poll workers. Spending money on a paper trail rather than to fix these known problems, he says, is a waste.

Officials in Shelley's office acknowledge the concerns with paper, but they insist that voting firms will overcome them. Most major voting companies, including Diebold, already say they can build systems that include a paper trail. "Our perspective is that voter confidence is paramount in terms of the election process," Tony Miller, an attorney in Shelley's office, says. "Even if this costs a few thousand dollars, the cost of democracy is not necessarily cheap and it shouldn't be the determining factor."

David Dill describes Shelley's decision as "the biggest breakthrough that the paper trail movement has had to date," and he says that he's certain "it will affect the attitude of people in other states." He was right: In December, Nevada also acted to require paper receipts. Dill also has high hopes for the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, a bill introduced in Congress by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, which would require a paper trail nationally. Three Democrats in the Senate -- Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton and Bob Graham -- have each proposed companion legislation.

But officials who've already invested in paperless machines will have a hard time joining the paper-trail bandwagon. In Georgia, for instance, Cathy Cox is sticking by her decision. In a speech to the state's political scientists in November, she assailed the critics who've lately attacked touch-screen voting systems, saying they "approach the issue of election technology as if on a mission to save humanity from the scourge of a worldwide conspiracy." But Cox, it should be noted, is massively invested in the reliability of the Diebold systems she purchased, having staked her political career -- and the millions it cost to purchase them -- on the new system.

The people who insist that Georgia's 2002 election was stolen may well be wrong. But the attention that they are focusing on voting machines is anything but misplaced. An election has to be above suspicion, even above the suspicion of some of the most suspicious people in a democracy. Says California's Tony Miller: "If people don't have confidence in the voting systems being used, then they lose faith in the voting process itself."

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