Down in Rio, they're laughing at big, powerful America.
Thousands of Brazilians, who vote using ATM-style machines at their precincts, must be sending incredulous e-mails to their expat pals in Palm Beach County, Florida: "You fellas use punch cards?"
Yup. Despite the fact that American diplomats are constantly needling other countries for their supposed backward politics, analysts say that the 2000 election highlights the fact that American democracy hinges, for the most part, on 1960s technology.
If this election produces any meaningful change, they say, it will probably be in the form of new technologies at the voting booth.
When election day ended without a new president, the nation turned its lonely eyes to Florida's Palm Beach County, where some voters complained that they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan when they had really meant to vote for Al Gore.
What's to blame? A faulty ballot, they said, whose design led them to believe that Gore, who was listed under Bush, should be selected by the second punch-hole. Actually, Gore's punch-hole was the third, and Buchanan was number two.
At first, the charge seemed like whining on the part of a defeated Gore camp, but then it was revealed that about 19,000 ballots in Palm Beach were thrown out on election night because holes for two presidential candidates had been punched in. That's when it started to seem that there was something rotten in the state of Florida.
But according to Ed Gerck, the CEO of the electronic voting firm Safevote, Florida alone shouldn't be pilloried. He said that Palm Beach-type chaos occurs all the time with punch-card voting systems – we just don't see it because the vote count usually isn't close enough to make a difference.
"There is a recount being done. If they did a second recount they would get another result," Gerck said, highlighting the unreliability of these systems.
Gerck said that besides the voting-for-two problem that was rampant in Palm Beach, another concern over punch systems is that sometimes a hole is not punched all the way through. So then the vote isn't counted.
"When you run the same deck of cards through two different machines," he said, "you get different results because sometimes some holes aren't recognized."
Gerck, who has a doctorate in physics and quantum mechanics from the Max Planck institute in Germany, has been studying the accuracy and security of paper ballots for a while – and he thinks they're riddled with problems.
Systems that use optical scanning instead of punch cards aren't much better, he said.
"Most of those systems use a certain threshold to determine if a space is marked," he said. "For example, 40 percent. If 40 percent of the area is marked, then it counts. But sometimes the voter is elderly, maybe they don't mark it with enough force – so you get an accuracy problem there."
Because Gerck now runs a company that's trying to get electronic voting into precincts, his solution to the problem is obvious: "We do the entire system electronically, safely, using cryptography, and with that system, you don't have such problems," he said.
Gerck said that states use paper ballots because of "inertia." They're what election officials know best, they're what voters know best, and because of that – because we haven't known anything else – they've become sacred in American democracy.
But the numbers in Florida should put us on the electronic track, Gerck said.
In the recount, Gore gained more than 2,000 votes, and Bush gained a few hundred. These might sound like piddling amounts when one considers that more than six million votes were cast in Florida – but suddenly, these few votes matter crucially, and the punch-card system seems to have screwed them up.
For the people who said that Internet voting was too buggy to be trusted, Gerck and others who are pushing e-voting can now point to paper voting as being, at least, not much better. And probably, they'll say, a lot worse.
Last week, Safevote conducted a "shadow election" in Contra Costa County, California, in order to prove to California Secretary of State Bill Jones that electronic voting was a better alternative to voting by paper.
They set up computers at precinct locations, and they asked people who came in to vote early if they'd like to try the system out.
"One hundred percent of the people who voted said they liked it," Gerck said of the more than 300 people who tried the system. He said that all of the darts that have traditionally been thrown at e-voting – that it isn't secure, for example, or that it will fool people who aren't familiar with computers – were refuted by the Contra Costa vote.
"We made a point of talking to the elderly," Gerck said. "A lady who was 80 and had never used a computer before said that she didn't have a problem using it. We had a drunk use it, and he said, 'If I can do this, anyone can.'"
What about security? Safevote invited people to try to hack into their system, posting all the hardware and software details of its design on the Web.
"We made everything public, and we even hosted an attack help page, and we created an attack hotline phone number," Gerck said. Gerck doesn't know how many people tried to attack the system, but he said that nobody succeeded.
So is electronic voting at precincts, if not Internet voting from remote locations, the way to prevent further crises in our democracies?
Perhaps, but Gerck said that the states would require much more testing of electronic systems before they would implement them.
And Doug Lewis, director of the election-monitoring group Election Center, said that high-tech systems might create as many problems as they'd solve.
"With full-electronic systems, you have no way to ensure that the voter wanted to vote differently than the system records. If someone makes a mistake on that kind of system, you could never go back and say there was a problem. You have no paper ballot to go back to look at," he said. "Now some people might think that's a good thing, and some people might say it isn't."
Politicians, Lewis said, love the paper ballot. "Anyone who runs for office is almost wedded to the paper ballot, because then they can go back and say that something was wrong."
Moreover, he said unequivocally, "Every voting system designed by man has some kind of flaw or disadvantage. The fact that we're seeing it now in Florida only means that we're looking at it closely."
But the fact is, people don't seem to like what they're seeing in Florida. Gore supporters are distributing a statistical study by Carnegie Mellon professor Greg Adams that practically proves the Palm Beach County vote is suspect.
Adams and his wife, Chatham College professor Chris Fastnow, plugged in county data on Buchanan, Bush and Gore votes in Florida to determine how likely it was that the Palm Beach data was aberrant.
"My jaw dropped when I looked at it," Adams said. And though Adams conceded that he leans toward Gore, he said that the statistical study shows that "there's a strong indication that people made mistakes in that county."
And even the ultra-conservative Buchanan has said that it's unlikely that the votes he got in Palm Beach County were really meant for him.
Of course, he might have ulterior motives. Maybe he hates Bush. Or maybe he just knows that a Gore presidency would be a full-employment act for pundits like Buchanan.
