During the past quarter of a century, with hardly anyone noticing, the inner workings of democracy have been computerized. All our elections, from mayor to President, are counted locally, in about ten thousand five hundred political jurisdictions, and gradually, since 1964, different kinds of computer-based voting systems have been installed in town after town, city after city, county after county. This year, fifty-five per cent of all votes—seventy-five per cent in the largest jurisdictions—will be counted electronically. If ninety-five million Americans vote on Tuesday, November 8th, the decisions expressed by about fifty-two million of them will be tabulated according to rules that programmers and operators unknown to the public have fed into computers.

In many respects, this electronic conversion has seemed natural, even inevitable. Both of the old ways—hand-counting paper ballots and relying on interlocked rotary counters to tabulate votes that are cast by pulling down levers on mechanical machines—have been shown to be susceptible to error and fraud. On Election Night, computers can usually produce the final results faster than any other method of tabulation, and so enable local officials to please reporters on deadlines and to avoid the suspicions of fraud which long delays in counting can stimulate.

Recently, however, computerized vote-counting has engendered controversy. Do the quick-as-a-wink, computerized systems count accurately? Are they vulnerable to fraud, as well—even fraud of a much more dangerous, centralized kind? Is the most widely used computerized system, the Votomatic, which relies on computer punch-card ballots, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters?

It appears that since 1980 errors and accidents have proliferated in computer-counted elections. Since 1984, the State of Illinois has tested local computerized systems by running many thousands of machine-punched mock ballots through them, rather than the few tens of test ballots that local election officials customarily use. As of the most recent tests this year, errors in the basic counting instructions in the computer programs had been found in almost a fifth of the examinations. These "tabulation-program errors" probably would not have been caught in the local jurisdictions. "I don't understand why nobody cares," Michael L. Harty, who was until recently the director of voting systems and standards for Illinois, told me last December in Springfield. "At one point, we had tabulation errors in twenty-eight per cent of the systems tested, and nobody cared."

Robert J. Naegele, who is the State of California's chief expert on certifying voting systems and is also the president of his own computer consulting firm, has been hired by the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) to write new voluntary national standards for computerized vote-counting equipment and programs. Last spring, in San Francisco, at a national conference of local-election officials, I asked Naegele whether computerized voting as it is now practiced in the United States is secure against fraud.

He pointed a thumb at the floor. "When we first started looking at this issue, back in the middle seventies, we found there were a lot of these systems that were vulnerable to fraud and out-and-out error," he said.

I asked him whether he regarded as adequate the typical fifty-five-ballot "logic-and-accuracy public test" that is conducted locally on the Votomatic computerized punch-card vote-counting system—which about four in ten voters will use on November 8th—and he said, "No."

Would such a test discover, for example, a "time bomb" set to start transferring a certain proportion of votes from one candidate to another at a certain time, or any other programmers' tricks?

"Of course not," Naegele said. "It's not a test of the system. It's not security!"

The old mechanical machines prevent citizens from "overvoting"—voting for more candidates in a race than they are entitled to vote for—but the Votomatic systems do not. Not only can people using these systems overvote but election workers, if they are dishonest, can punch extra holes in ballots to invalidate votes that have been correctly cast or to cast votes themselves in races the voter has skipped. In the 1984 general election, about a hundred and thirty-seven thousand out of a total of 4.7 million voters in Ohio did not cast valid ballots for President—mostly, according to Ohio's secretary of state, because of overvoting. The computerized punch-card voting system is "a barrier to exercise of the franchise," and causes "technological disenfranchisement," Neil Heighberger, the dean of the College of Social Sciences at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, concluded in a recent study he made of the subject.

A federal judge, William L. Hungate, ruling last December on a lawsuit in St. Louis, declared that the computerized punch-card voting system as it has been used in that city denies blacks an equal opportunity with whites to participate in the political process. The suit was filed by Michael V. Roberts, a black candidate for president of the Board of Aldermen who in March of last year had lost to a white by a fourth of one per cent in a city election in which voting positions on ballots in the black wards were more than three times as likely not to be counted as those in white wards. Roberts, who was joined in the suit by the St. Louis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, contended that computerized voting is such a relatively complex process that it is tantamount to a literacy test, and literacy tests have been prohibited by federal law as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. Judge Hungate found that in four local elections since 1981 voting positions had not been counted by the computerized system on anywhere from four to eight of every hundred ballots in black wards, compared with about two of every hundred in white wards (and also found that in the March, 1987, election the computerized returns from six per cent of the precincts had "irreconcilable discrepancies"). The evidence indicated that the computer had passed over the uncounted positions because of either overvoting or undervoting, which is failing to cast a vote in a race. The Judge ordered officials to count by hand all ballots that contained overvotes or undervotes and to intensify voter education in the black wards, but the city appealed, arguing that the racial differential does not always hold true in the city's elections. The Missouri secretary of state, Roy Blunt, called the order to recount the ballots by hand unfair and said that it could "make punch-card voting unworkable."

In Pueblo, Colorado, in 1980, suspicions about the vote-counting on punch-card equipment led to an investigation by a computer expert, but nothing was proved. In Pennsylvania, in 1980, two of three examiners recommended that the Votomatic punch-card system marketed by Computer Election Services (C.E.S.), of Berkeley, California, be rejected, on the ground that it was fraud-prone, but the secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania approved it anyway. In Tacoma, Washington, in 1982 and 1987, in the only known local referendums on computerized voting, citizens' crusades, led by a conservative Republican, Eleanora Ballasiotes, that focussed on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud resulted each time in the voters' three-to-one rejection of the systems that their local officials were about to buy. A group of defeated Democratic candidates in Elkhart, Indiana, sued local election officials in 1983, alleging that computer-based irregularities had occurred in a 1982 election; they have since lost three lawsuits, and a fourth one continues. In Dallas, Terry Elkins, the campaign manager for Max Goldblatt, who in 1985 ran for mayor, came to believe, on the basis of a months-long study of the surviving records and materials of the election, that Goldblatt had been kept out of a runoff by manipulation of the computerized voting system. The attorney general of Texas, Jim Mattox, was impressed by the charges and conducted an official investigation of them. Dallas authorities have declared that since there is no evidence of criminal behavior the case is closed, but Mattox has refused to close it. "I do not think that there were adequate explanations for the anomalies," he told me, in Austin.