I hate to say I told you so. Who am I kidding? I love to say it. I just hate to admit how much I relish saying it.

In "Bits of Democracy," a tirade published on September 24, 2004, I complained about electronic voting machines that don't produce a paper trail. I expressed the view that, because technology can fail, results should be verifiable.

What did I read shortly after the U.S. election? An Associated Press story picked up by a number of publications reported that electronic voting machine problems caused 4,500 votes to go astray in North Carolina and 3,800 extra votes to be cast in George Bush's favor in North Carolina.

The Associated Press report, or at least the versions that I read, did not give a definitive explanation of the cause of the problem in Ohio, but one suspicion is that it had something to do with the fact that votes were recorded in a number of different locations for backup reasons. Note to system operators: Never use the backup stuff unless you're absolutely certain that the primary data source has failed. The backup is there to make sure that you can generate an accurate result in the event of problems, not to screw things up when everything otherwise goes according to plan.

In North Carolina, the problem seems to be that someone thought that the voting machines had more storage than they actually had. When I was a programmer, back at the dawn of time, we used to put in error-checking code. The first statement in the block read something like "ON ERROR DO..." We didn't let the program continue merrily throwing away results.

I never programmed a voting machine, but if I had, I would have put in some code that, in the event of a storage overflow, would make the machine stop accepting votes and flash a bright, bold, red message to both the voter and operator. Instead, the errant machine seems to have said something like this: "Thank you very much for your vote. Now go away while I lose it."

Why wasn't there enough storage in the first place? I understand that voter turnout was much higher than in the past. The participation rate in 2004 soared to about 60% from 51% in 2000. (To put this into perspective, that just about caught up to the turnout rates in Canada and India but was still well below the 70% to 87% rates registered in most of Europe.) Nonetheless, high voter turnout shouldn't be an excuse.

This isn't the 1960s, when a megabyte of storage cost about the equivalent of the entire space program. Go out and buy enough storage. It's not a terribly difficult calculation. Take the highest possible number of registered voters (assuming that everyone of voting age will register should give you a large enough safety margin), multiply that by the number of bytes required to store each vote (assuming that everyone votes for all positions and ballot initiatives), and then buy that much storage. With the cost of storage these days, buying a little extra shouldn't cost all that much per precinct. I think democracy is worth it.

You no doubt assume that, since I live in a country that is generally pegged as liberal, I must be disappointed by the results. You would be right, but that has nothing to do with my gripe. This is not sour grapes. It is true that, due to the position of the U.S. in the world and particularly due to the relationship between Canada and the U.S., the results affect me. However, I fully accept the fact that because I am not an American, I do not and should not have a say in U.S. elections, unless, of course, you foolishly want to give me a say. It's just that I think that miscounting votes, or not counting some votes at all, in any election anywhere in the world is a wee bit of problem. OK, it's a whale of problem.

You might ask why I'm concerned when the margins of victory in both Ohio and North Carolina were sufficiently large that the problems did not affect the outcome. You are absolutely right. George Bush won those states and almost certainly would have won them even if all of the votes were properly counted. Then again, those two reports were just the errors that were discovered. What if there were other problems that were not detected? Who knows? Maybe by the time that you read this the media will have reported on others.

I hear the argument that you are about to make. George Bush got over 3 million more votes than John Kerry. And, in all states with enough Electoral College votes to change the ultimate outcome, the margin of victory was greater than any likely errors. Again, you're correct and correct. But looking at only this election is way too shortsighted. What if this was not 2004, but 2000. What if those 3,800 extra votes for Bush in North Carolina were in Florida instead? Errors occur randomly. It could just as easily have happened in Florida as in North Carolina. And what if the error was not detected or could not be corrected? Nobody knows who those 4,500 people in Ohio voted for. Back in 2000, Bush won Florida by just 537 disputed votes. The miscast 3,800 votes would have been more than six times as many votes as would have been needed to make Al Gore president that year.

It didn't happen this time, but what about 2008, 2012, or 2016? By then, there will likely be even more electronic voting machines producing unverifiable results; technology marches on. So what if we lose a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of votes? That's progress. If you didn't read the previous sentence with a high degree of sarcasm, then please go back and reread it giving the voice inside your head the proper inflection.

In a democracy, it is critical that the vote count accurately reflect the will of the people. In addition, it is almost as important that it be seen to do so. Without a verifiable vote count, that may not be true. If, in any democracy, a large segment of the population (beyond the lunatic fringe who see conspiracies everywhere) rightly--or, admittedly, probably wrongly--begins to think that a random number generator is as likely to accurately report the vote count as the counting process, then that democracy is not worth having. Maybe we should just use a rousing game of "rock, paper, scissors" to pick our leaders.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact Joel at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. He reports that a usually reliable source has told him that there is likely no truth to the rumor that Massachusetts applied to become a Canadian province after the election.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.

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