SACRAMENTO, California -- Mathematically, an election is a pretty simple process. It's just addition, really, the kind of thing one learns in first grade.
Or at least, we all wish it were so easy.
So easy that all voters would have equal access to polling places, that they would be sure which candidate they were choosing, that the machines would properly record their votes, and that, in the end, it would all boil down to mere counting.
But in practice, the process is rarely so smooth, say election officials convened here for the Election Technology Expo, held at the behest of the state's top voting official, Secretary of State Bill Jones.
As the nation saw in the last general election, antiquated voting systems can wreak havoc on the democratic process. Voting machines that are easily gummed up with chads, systems that don't notify voters that they've made a mistake, ballot designs that confuse people. These are the hallmarks of U.S. democracy, experts say, and the key to improvement is technology.
And that's what's on display here. There are computerized devices everywhere you look, and not a hanging chad in sight.
"The last election put a tremendous amount of pressure on punch-card technology," said David Reeves, a representative of Hart InterCivic, an old hand in the voting business.
Hart's newest machine is called the eSlate, which looks like a giant Palm Pilot. Like most of the systems on display here, the machine is fully electronic -- there's no paper ballot, just a big screen that displays the list of candidates. A voter makes a choice by turning a selection wheel to highlight the desired candidate's name, and then presses enter.
The eSlate is a snap to figure out. Most people who've used a computer could get this in a second, and others might need a 30-second tutorial. It's easier to use than an ATM.
But in truth, so are all the systems on display here.
Most offer some kind of easy-to-learn navigation system like the eSlate, or they use a touch screen. Most prevent voters from picking more than one candidate.
Most of these systems can be accessed by disabled people. Most store the votes in some kind of write-once memory storage system that can't be hacked into, and is easily counted at a central polling location.
Indeed, after seeing several of these systems -- and there are more than a dozen on display here -- they all start to blend, in your mind, into the same system. You start to picture a perfect voting system, something that's fully electronic, from registration to counting, something in which we could have complete confidence. It all looks so simple.
And then something obvious, and a bit discomforting, hits you. "Wait a minute!" you say. "This is simple! None of this technology is particularly new -- touch screens, portable storage, all this stuff has been around since the '70s. Why don't we have this stuff already?"
When asked this simple question, many of the system vendors hemmed and hawed. Many said that their system was not, indeed, simple -- it may look simple, but the guts of the thing, they insisted, hid very sophisticated electronics. One vendor even used the adjective "space age."
The most sophisticated thing about these machines, though, is that they didn't use funny things called chads. Beyond that, they're all virtually the same answer to a fairly simple problem of math.
So why didn't we have these systems last November?
The answer to that was on display here too, in the personages of the county elections officials who buzzed around each of the booths. See, all the triumphs in election engineering matter little if these officials -- who actually buy the stuff that goes into your precinct -- don't think such technology is necessary.
In the past, the prevailing paradigm in the election game was, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Or, more precisely, If it ain't that broke, it ain't worth the cost of fixing.
Florida changed that. County officials from all over California spent several minutes at each vendor's booth here, asking very specific questions about the systems on display. These smacked of the kinds of detailed inquiries one might ask before buying a new car -- "What happens if a voter pulls out the card before voting?" or "What if I enter in the wrong number?"
So oiled were the gears of bureaucracy that toward the end of the day, elections officials and systems vendors were gathering in different parts of the Hyatt (where the expo was held), talking numbers, in private.
Will it all amount to anything?
It will, but it's hard to say how long the reform will take, according to Brian Gangler, the information technology officer at the Secretary of State's office.
"The technology is definitely out there," he said. "But there are many obstacles."
