A strange thing is happening in American elections: The secret ballot is quietly becoming the invisible ballot. When millions of Americans go to their polling places to cast their ballots this November, they will use a newfangled electronic voting machine and register their votes with a touch of the screen. No hanging chads, no butterfly ballots. Election 2000 problem solved, right? Wrong. For as annoying as those punch card ballots might be, they at least provide a tangible record of the voter's intent. In all but a tiny number of cases, that intent is clear; and when it is not clear, it can at least be reviewed and debated. But these new voting machines provide no tangible voter-verified output or record of each individual ballot cast. If something goes wrong or if a ballot dispute arises, we just have to take the computer's word for it. This could be a big step backward for honest elections. The concern is not merely hypothetical. The possibility of malfunction or malicious tampering is a very real one. Many news organizations, including The New York Times, have reported these machines are vulnerable to hacking and have produced unexplained data irregularities. Critics have documented instances of unauthorized source code "s" being made just before an election. It has also been revealed that the president of Diebold, a major manufacturer of touch screen systems, is active in partisan politics, writing in a Republican fund-raising solicitation he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think these electronic voting systems could be corrupted. The Pima County director of elections reassured me in writing that Pima intends to continue using an optical scan system. In this system, a computer tallies vote results, but voters indicate their preferences on paper ballots that can be counted by hand if necessary. But many locales are quickly adopting the touch-screen technology. Should citizens in these places be concerned that their votes can never be independently verified? Many people think so. In fact, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has proposed a law to require touch-screen systems to print out a paper record for each voter to verify and turn in as an official backup copy of his or her vote. It seems like a simple solution. After all, the makers of these election systems also make bank ATMs, which easily produce written records of their transactions at the user's request. Unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress want nothing to do with the measure. I recently wrote to Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., my congressman, expressing support for this bill. His rather disingenuous response was: "Why should we federalize the whole system in order to solve a minor problem? "Absent a strong showing of systemic disenfranchisement of voters, it is difficult to justify federal regulation of state and local elections." This is a troubling position. Never mind the artful dodge about state primacy, this is not some federal power grab; it would simply ensure basic protection of voting rights. And it misses the bigger point entirely, which is that the touch screen machines make it simply impossible to demonstrate systematic disenfranchisement - or in fact to demonstrate anything other than what the computer says is true. If even one machine is in error, an entire election could be swayed, with absolutely no way of correcting the mistake - certainly not a "minor problem." This is not to argue that anyone plans to fix elections, but congressional Republicans don't even seem to care if someone could. As citizens of a democracy, we cannot allow our most sacred right, the franchise, to be held hostage by politicians and private companies whose only response to our legitimate concerns is essentially, "You'll just have to trust us." That's not the way democracy is supposed to work.