Henry Norr is a longtime reporter and editor covering technology issues. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Fueled by a seemingly unending series of damaging revelations about the insecurity of electronic voting systems and the practices of the companies that make them, the burgeoning movement demanding that new election equipment generate a voter-verifiable paper ballots enters 2004 with growing legitimacy and surprising momentum.

The grassroots activists and computer scientists leading the effort to put the brakes on the nation's headlong rush toward paperless voting—based on touchscreen-equipped computers—scored a stunning, if incomplete, victory just before Thanksgiving, when California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered that counties purchasing new touchscreen voting terminals must provide a "voter-verified paper audit trail," starting in July 2005, and that the four California counties already using the high-tech systems must retrofit them with printers by July 2006.

Though critics of the new technology had hoped for more—a ruling that would cover this November's elections and perhaps a moratorium on purchases of new equipment until printer-equipped systems are fully tested and certified—his ruling still marked an important turning point: it was the first time a state government has mandated a voter-verified paper record.

That gave a new impetus to similar demands in other states: Nevada quickly followed California's lead, several other states are expected to do so soon, and Ohio has decided to delay deployment of touchscreen systems it has already purchased and planned to roll out in March. (On the other side of the ledger, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. continues to push ahead with plans to deploy 11,000 new touchscreens in that state, even though a review he commissioned concluded that the system was "at high risk of compromise.")

Another effect of the California ruling, it seems, was to give the case against blackbox voting new credibility with the corporate media. The issue—once confined to computer-science newsletters, then taken up over the past year by progressive and libertarian journals and Web sites—has in recent months been covered with surprising depth and fairness by mainstream dailies and network news.

And the media are not just giving the critics a hearing, but in many cases endorsing their position: The list of papers that have editorially endorsed the demand that new equipment provide a voter-verified paper trail includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Seattle Times, as well as numerous smaller publications such as The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and The Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press. Last month Fortune magazine even designated paperless voting the "worst technology of 2003."

A major factor in the movement's development has been the support of prominent computer scientists. After all, who's going to believe voting-equipment manufacturers' self-interested claims that their products are fail-safe and tamper-proof when numerous internationally renowned experts—the people who know better than anyone else how high technology really works—say both history and science demonstrate that there's no basis for such guarantees?

Though he's by no means the first in his field to take up the issue—he himself is quick to credit pioneer experts such as Peter Neumann, Rebecca Mercuri and Barbara Simons—Stanford University Professor David Dill has given the movement new energy and leadership over the last year. A resolution he drafted demanding that a voter-verifiable audit trail be an essential requirement for certification of new voting systems has garnered the support of more than 1,500 other technologists, as well as thousands of people from other fields. A Web site he runs, VerifiedVoting.org, has become action central for the activists on the issue—not only a rich compendium of background information and news about the issue, but also a hub for organizing and lobbying efforts.

Dill and his colleagues argue on both historical and technical grounds that paperless systems—known in the field as DRE, or "direct recording electronic" equipment—can't be trusted for something as important to a democracy as voting. But persuasive as their arguments may be, they might never have caught the public eye if it weren't for a steady stream of disclosures about the industry that have shown that the critics' concerns are far from purely theoretical possibilities.

"I couldn't have asked for a better ally than Diebold," jokes Dill about the voting-machine manufacturer that has been the subject of most—though by no means all—of these embarrassing revelations. Leaks of its vote-counting software and internal e-mails—quickly circulated across the Internet, notably via the muckraking Web site BlackboxVoting.com—have demonstrated not only fundamental security flaws in its products, but also a haphazard, even contemptuous approach to the whole issue on the part of at least some of its employees.

Diebold compounded the problem by a heavy-handed legal campaign—eventually abandoned—to force the hosts of Web sites where the leaked documents were posted, including Swarthmore University, to remove them. And the company's president, Walden O'Dell, reminded Democrats—and other democrats—what the stakes in the debate could be when he penned a fund-raising letter on behalf of George W. Bush in which he declared that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in this year's elections.

The latest scandal broke in mid-December, when an audit by Shelley's office revealed that Diebold had installed uncertified software in all 17 California counties that use its electronic voting equipment. That revelation was particularly damaging, according to Kim Alexander, founder and president of the California Voter Foundation and a longtime critic of paperless voting, because many state and local election officials had responded to the arguments of the academics and the damaging disclosures about industry practices by arguing that their own certification and monitoring systems would prevent flawed technologies from getting into the field.

"They say we have a whole network of checks and balances they rigidly adhere to," Alexander said. "What this last case showed is that the process simply isn't reliable." Beyond the technology debate, she added, "the bigger picture is that election security is a house of cards, one that's easily toppled."

While the battle continues in communities across the country, the focus now may shift to Washington, D.C. Congressman Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a former Princeton University physicist, last year filed a bill that would amend the Help America Vote Act—the 2002 legislation that provides funding for new voting equipment—to require a voter-verified paper record for the 2004 elections. That bill, H.R. 2239, now has 94 co-sponsors, including three Republicans. In December, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) filed a similar bill in the Senate (S.1980), and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) announced her attention to do likewise, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced a separate bill that would add a general voter-verification requirement, but not require that it take the form of a paper record—opening the door, according to Dill and other critics, for technological pseudo-fixes that add no real guarantee of the systems' integrity.

The prospects for these bills are of course uncertain. The opposition—led by the voting-equipment manufacturers, but supported by many state and local election officials who don't want to face the extra hassle and expense inevitably associated with a paper trail, as well as by some disability-rights activists and, surprisingly, the League of Women Voters—will surely be formidable, and although the Bush administration has yet to take a public stand on the issue, it would be a major surprise in the wake of the Florida fiasco if the Republican majority were to support a paper-trail requirements.

But Holt said last week that, "I don't think the leadership in Congress will be able to ignore this issue in an election year. I'm confident that we're going to come together in a bipartisan way to protect every citizen's vote." He may well be overly optimistic, but in light of the remarkable progress the opposition to blackbox voting has made over the last year, it's a safe bet that the issue won't die quietly.