FROM THE DESK OF DAVID POGUE
Has the Time Come for Touchscreen Voting?

On Sunday, "CBS Sunday Morning" will air my report on touchscreen voting machines, which 50 million Americans will use in November's election. The main characters include Avi Rubin (the Johns Hopkins professor who analyzed the software in Diebold machines and found it disturbingly insecure); Rush Holt (the Congressman who's proposed a bill that requires a printed paper trail); Kevin Shelley (the California Secretary of State who banned or decertified e-voting machines statewide); and representatives of Diebold and Sequoia (the number 1 and 2 voting-machine makers).

These machines are polarizing, hot-button gadgets. One side calls them a security and reliability nightmare, and predicts that this fall, we'll see chaos and uncertainty that make the 2000 hanging-chad episode look like a warm-up act.

The other side points out that the touchscreen machines are multilingual; they can be used unassisted by the blind and illiterate (thanks to headphones); they have a 0.0 percent overvote rate (voting for more than one candidate by accident, which gets your ballot thrown out); and older voters love them (because on most systems, you can increase the type size). This side insists that the worrywarts are ignoring the checks, balances and tests carried out by each state before the machines are used.

The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in between.

In the next couple of e-columns, I'd like to share with you some of the most interesting interview bits. But this week, here are some common accusations flung by partisans on each side of the argument-and my assessment of their validity.

1. "How can we trust these things if the public can't inspect the software inside?" Open-source voting software (available for inspection by programmers all over the world) would certainly ensure that the voting-machine companies haven't rigged an election, which is one of the most common fears.

But this approach has risks, too. For example, it takes months for a certain software version to make it through state and federal testing and certification. What would happen if someone raised a question about the software a week before the election? Chaos, that's what.