Vote machine decision may not be final

THE FIGHT OVER HIGH-TECH VOTING MACHINES has become a multi-ring circus.

Montgomery County is under pressure from Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to choose which kind of machine it wants as a replacement for the old punch-card system. Nearly all other Ohio counties have already chosen.

Meanwhile, a joint House-Senate state legislative committee is holding hearings on the new machines. Some members seem to want to require modifications of the machines now on the market. A proposal is pending in Washington to do that, too.

Any decision that the Montgomery County Board of Elections makes now would stand a good chance of being overtaken by events. And yet the case for picking a machine is strong, because Secretary Blackwell is threatening to pick one if the county doesn't. He claims that a federal law requires him to move ahead, as does pressure in court from opponents of the old punch-card-dominated system.

The fight these days about whether and how to replace punch cards is not so much between Democrats and Republicans as between those who have been focused on this issue since 2000 and those who have only focused in the last few months. The veterans of the issue — including Secretary Blackwell and the sponsors of the federal law — are largely convinced that the high-tech machines are more reliable vote-counters than the punch-card systems. They point to successful elections that have been held with these systems.

The newcomers are more worried. They point to studies that have been done that show that the new machines could be compromised. And they simply note that computers often don't work.

No great harm can come from slowing down the process to confront the concerns of the skeptics. If Congress made any major mistake in passing the post-2000 conversion from punch cards, it was in trying to get the whole thing done by 2006. Ideally, voters who have qualms should have some time to watch experiments in various jurisdictions.

The punch-card system isn't so bad that it needed to be junked immediately. The system can be made to work better than it did in 2000. That requires mainly educating the voters on what to do in the voting booth.

The skeptics are now proposing a "verifiable paper trail," so that a voter would have some sort of physical confirmation that his or her vote had been counted, and so that a recount could happen. One idea, for example, is to add a printer to each voting machine that would give the voter a paper ballot showing how the voter voted. Then the voter would put the ballot in a box. And, in a recount, those ballots would be counted.

That has some appeal. It also has downsides. It adds mechanical equipment that could break down. It raises the possibility of people coming in with phony ballots, or forgetting to their ballots in the box.

Meanwhile, the reassurance it offers voters would be somewhat redundant, because the computers themselves tell voters how their votes have been recorded as they go through the ballot electronically.

All systems have flaws. All have downsides. All have safeguards. But if adding this kind of fail-safe measure provides voters with an extra level of assurance that everything has been done that can reasonably be done to make sure their votes have been counted, fine. It's more money and more delay. But the cause is important.

The cost, delay and other downsides could probably be avoided if the new systems were simply adopted more slowly, and everybody had time to develop confidence that they work. But, largely because of the federal law, things are moving quickly now.