But to the extent that things did go right on Election Day, much of the credit is due to activists who've been fighting to reform our election system for the past few years, says David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who founded Verified Voting, which calls for paper trails in touch-screen machines. "I think activists, including paper-trail activists, deserve significant credit for this election going more smoothly than it could have," he says. "I'm sure [elections officials] tried harder to make it go more smoothly just because of the attention we focused on this."

Things would have been worse without these reformers, Dill says. "There was a possibility that many counties in Ohio would have bought electronic voting machines. That would have been an utter disaster." (Because of the activists' efforts to derail paperless touch-screen systems, most voters in Ohio instead used punch-card systems, which Dill acknowledges isn't ideal, but "at least they weren't deploying new electronic systems for the first time in this election," he says.) Thanks to the activists' efforts in Nevada this year, people voted on touch-screen machines that were equipped with a paper trail, a system that worked well by most accounts. And in California, voters concerned about the reliability of electronic systems were allowed to cast paper ballots, also thanks to the efforts of reformers. Because of the efforts of thousands of reformers, the election "went much better than it could have," Dill says.

But there's work yet to be done. Just about every sub-system in the machinery of American elections, from the processes used to register voters to those used to count the votes, needs to be improved. In addition, a great deal of analysis and research must be done into how specific parts of the system failed on Nov. 2. For instance, why, exactly, in different places, were the lines so long? Answering this one question will be a difficult task, Chapin says. "One of the things that people will need to figure out is how much of this was caused by extra demand, and how much was caused by not having enough machines, and how much was people being extra careful because they knew the race was close and their votes were going to be more important this time? If you were to write an equation about what was involved in the long lines, you'd see there were a lot of variables there. We need to find out what part each of those variables played."

At this point, it's unclear, too, how many people were disenfranchised by the long lines. Everybody agrees that it's fundamentally unfair that some people were forced to wait in line for hours just to cast a ballot -- but how many people turned away from the polls because of the lines? How many people couldn't find the time to vote because of the lines? Experts aren't yet sure. The most comprehensive numbers on this will likely be released by the U.S. Census Bureau sometime next year. In 2000, according to the bureau, as many as a million votes were "lost" in the United States due to flawed polling-place operations such as long lines. Some experts worry that the problem has not improved, or has become worse, since then.

Only when some of this data comes in can reformers begin earnestly working to fix some of the worst problems we saw on Nov. 2. But over time, as election fever diminishes, will many would-be reformers give up? Will the folks who are so concerned about elections right now because they believe that there's a chance the result might be overturned become less enthusiastic as Bush's win slowly becomes more certain, more impervious to charges of fraud?

The experts who've been working on this issue for years are not counting on a huge groundswell of newfound public support for their work. What if people "can't put their hands on enough 'fraud' to change the results of the presidential election? Does that mean they give up?" Rodriguez-Taseff asks. "Sadly ... I think they do." Chapin, of Electionline, echoes this thought. "My best guess is that something on the order of 98 percent of the people who've been interested in this will now move on to something else," he says. Still, he notes, "the good news is that the people who remain leave the group of people interested in election reform much bigger than it was six months ago. And now that the election is over, there's some good in this being treated as a policy matter, rather than as a purely political matter."

There should have been a big push for comprehensive election reform after the 2000 election in the United States, but that didn't happen. "Other things cut in line -- September 11, gay marriage, the war, you name it," Chapin says. Now, Chapin hopes, election reform will creep back onto the agenda.

Yet it's likely that the only way lawmakers will fix our elections is if citizens press for it -- and only if they press for it constantly, in a nonpartisan manner, as part of a broad effort to remake the way we vote rather than to reverse the results of the last election.

And for all the people who were so passionately involved in that election, what better way to spend the next four years than to dedicate your efforts to remaking our democracy? If you think the American system is broken, if you've felt alienated and abused by recent political affairs, doing the good, honest, hard work of fixing things may feel quite refreshing, activists say. Lockshin, the Berkeley student, offers this testimonial: "Now that I've worked on this with Election Protection, I'm sure I'll be doing it again. I'll be doing it every year, till they stop needing me."

Recent Stories