All told, the voting process has not been fixed; if the November election is close, there will be fresh questions about its credibility.

PHILADELPHIA – Joseph Heller, the late author of “Catch-22,” would have loved the election that took place in Florida last winter, potentially the opening salvo in a nationwide electronic-voting crisis that could reduce the 2000 chad flap to sideshow status.

Yes, it was another Florida whodunit. In January, Broward County’s new touch-screen machines inexplicably failed to record the votes of 134 people who had shown up to pick a new legislator. This omission proved significant because, when all the recorded votes were tallied, the winner had prevailed by only 12.

Hence, the catch-22: Under state law, a hand recount was required – yet there was nothing to recount, because touch screens don’t produce paper receipts. The losing candidate, with no way to find out what happened to those 134 voters, therefore claimed the touch screens were illegal. But because the state previously had OK’d the touch screens, local officials decreed that the results without a recount were legal.

Ellen Brodsky, a Broward County elections clerk, fumed about this the other day: “What kind of nonsense is this, that we’re still going to be having bad elections in the United States?”

Goodbye, chads; hello, brave new world. Punch cards and paper ballots are on the wane, and high tech is on the rise, because the feds are ponying up big money to make it happen. Fifty million registered voters – 29 percent of the electorate – can use electronic machines this year, up from 19 million in 2000.

But the rush to embrace the cutting-edge technology is sowing unease among election reform experts in Washington; as Norman Ornstein put it: “It is now becoming increasingly and frighteningly clear that we have the ingredients in place for a much larger and broader election debacle in November.”

Touch screens are now the hottest commodity in the electoral market – voting can seem as easy as using an ATM – but their critics (citing a slew of studies) insist that the machines can be easily hacked by people who want to tamper with the tallies; that the machines are prone to glitches and breakdowns (as California learned in its primary this spring); that the machine companies use uncertified software (California again); and that, thanks to the absence of paper receipts, there’s no tangible way to check their tallies.

California’s recent woes were bared anew on April 30, when the state’s top election official decided to ban some of the new machines that were purchased for the presidential election – and asked the state attorney general to consider launching a fraud probe against Diebold, a top touch-screen manufacturer.

Worse yet, the most conspiracy-minded critics are upset that Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold, is a prominent fund-raiser for President Bush. Diebold is headquartered in Ohio, a battleground state that is switching heavily to Diebold touch screens this year. O’Dell wrote in a letter to GOP donors last year: “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.”

O’Dell has since declared that he’d never commit a “treasonous felony atrocity” such as vote tampering, but the flap underscores the concerns of officials who foresee another close presidential race and fear any new factor that could prompt questions about the legitimacy of elections. Especially since half the electorate already doesn’t bother to vote.

“We don’t need to give people another reason to lower their confidence in the voting process,” said DeForest Soaries Jr., a former New Jersey secretary of state who chairs a new federal watchdog agency, the Election Assistance Commission, which will quiz touch-screen companies at a public hearing Wednesday. “We go around lecturing the world, promoting democracy, but if voting is the cornerstone of democracy, we’ve got to get it right.”

The companies – there are only six – staunchly defend their products. Diebold executive Bob Urosevich said touch-screen voting “has evolved to be the most secure and accurate election system in the history of our democracy. It is a dramatic improvement to the chad-laden voting systems.” Georgia officials, who have introduced touch screens statewide, swear by them.

Susan MacManus, a Florida political analyst and former state election official, said that the companies were being unfairly demonized, and that “it’s easy to whip people into a frenzy, because an election is at stake.” In the real world of the polling place, she said, “it would be hard to orchestrate computer fraud, because there are so many people looking over your shoulder.”

But skeptics contend that state election officials are rushing to embrace a flawed technology, before the feds have even devised rigorous standards. Soaries’ new commission is tasked to police the touch screen industry, but, thanks to slow movement by the White House, it has taken two years to get the watchdogs in place.

“In Ohio, it has been a horror story,” said Teresa Fedor, a career schoolteacher and Democratic state senator. “We’ve just agreed to spend $130 million on a touch-screen system, and we don’t even know if it’s good. It’s all being driven by the companies’ marketing. There are no standards. This is like building the nuclear industry without any rules.

“Before, we were worried about hanging chads. How much better off are we now, with an invisible chip?”

A squad of computer experts, hired last year by Ohio officials to examine the touch screens, found “several significant security issues” and 57 security flaws. The warnings in Maryland have been stronger; four separate reports have concluded that the machines were vulnerable to glitches or tampering. Even the report Diebold likes best has found that the company’s machines were “at high risk of compromise.”

Maryland has opted to buy the touch screens anyway, and that decision has triggered a lawsuit by citizen activists, who want to bar the machines until they can be retrofitted with a backup paper trail. Their lawyer, Ryan Phair, said: “We need to ensure that the lessons of 2000 in Florida aren’t lost. Why should we wait for a disaster to happen before we act?”

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

California already has experienced problems. In its March 2 primary, thousands of voters in two populous counties were disenfranchised when Diebold touch screens broke down. And Diebold didn’t help its cause; in all 17 counties that it served, the company violated state law – and exposed itself to a potential fraud probe – by installing software that had not been examined by state officials. The company since has apologized, and has pledged to address and fix all technical problems.

But Soaries, the federal watchdog, is perturbed by that pledge: “Why don’t they identify problems before Mrs. Jones is standing in line on Election Day? … We’ve turned the voting process over to private companies, much more than I am comfortable with.”

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

The stopgap solution, perhaps, is to require a backup paper trail. And U.S. Rep. Rush Holt , D-N.J., is pushing for a federal law in time for the Nov. 2 election. Outside the Capitol the other day, he said: “Ever had a laptop computer problem? You don’t curse Dell or Apple. You just show common sense, and back everything up.”

He was feted by the foot soldiers of a burgeoning citizen group, verifiedvoting.org. They soon marched away, hoping to enlist more lawmakers. But their efforts are probably futile. Holt has 134 cosponsors, but only seven are Republican, and the Republicans, who control the House, dislike the bill. They argue that any new use of paper would be a step backward, “a return to flawed systems.”

All told, the voting process has not been fixed; if the November election is close, there will be fresh questions about its credibility.

In the words of Floridian Susan MacManus: “Potentially, we’re looking at a real mess. Are we just putting a patch on a tire that’s about to explode?”