Americans put revamped voting technology to test

By Mary Milliken

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In California, cradle of the computer industry, most voters will use paper and ink to cast ballots in the U.S. election on November 4.

In contrast, voters in Brazil and India press buttons in all-electronic elections that take digital voting technology to the Amazon and Himalayas.

In the United States in 2000, a ballot fiasco in Florida delayed the result of the presidential election by 35 days. But in Brazil in 2006, 130 million votes were counted in 2.5 hours.

Such are the ironies of how the world votes. But although some might see low-tech voting in the hi-tech United States, experts say Americans will find more reliable and secure voting systems in this election than in 2000 and 2004.

"We have retired the punch card ballots, which were demonstrably a bad way to vote," said Charles Stewart, head of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

"We are just about to retire the mechanical lever machines which were also not a great way to vote. Voters using those two technologies were 40 to 50 percent of the electorate in 2000."

Indeed, the punch card ballots developed in the 1960s were at the heart of the famous recount in Florida in 2000 that ended with Republican George W. Bush narrowly defeating Democrat Al Gore.

That nightmare sparked a rush toward electronic voting machines, but myriad technical glitches and security flaws in 2004 tarnished that technology's reputation.

Some states and counties readjusted their electronic systems and this year counties in 24 states will vote with electronic voting or lever machines. But many dumped electronic machines and went back to paper, while investing in optical scanning devices for counting ballots.

Most voters in California, for example, will ink a paper ballot and drop it in an optical scanner, giving voters the reliability afforded by a paper trail.

"This year, paper voting has eclipsed electronic voting, and I consider that to be progress," said Kim Alexander, president of voter advocacy group California Voter Foundation.

'RABBITS' WARREN OF SYSTEMS'

California is deemed the best prepared of the 50 U.S. states for election system problems this year, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and voting watchdog groups. Some big electoral players like Texas, New Jersey and Virginia are judged ill prepared.

"For sure, there is going to be a problem somewhere, there always is in a country as vast as ours, that is as complex as ours," said Lawrence Norden, who heads the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center.

The closer the race, the more scrutiny there is on the voting system, the experts note. But current polls indicate the presidential race may not be a cliffhanger as Democrat Barack Obama shows a widening lead over Republican John McCain.