Easy federal money prompted many states to move to electronic voting, a decision they are now trying to reverse.

Imagine you're on the Titanic. The captain has set a course across the North Atlantic that is heading straight for an iceberg. He has ramped up the speed in order to impress the passengers with his spiffy new ship. You're from the future. You know what is about to happen. What to do?

Many state election officials today feel like they are in this spot, worried that their expensive--but highly fallible--touch-screen voting machines will spoil the 2008 presidential election. Continued problems with the complex machines have caused many states to disavow them and sound the retreat to more reliable, and reliably auditable, paper-based voting systems.

All the talk about convenient and liberating voter participation over the Internet has subsided to a whimper with the main developer of an open-source Internet voting system abandoning the project as impossible to secure. The problem for election officials now is that they took the nearly $4 billion the federal government allocated after the 2000 election Florida hanging-chad fiasco and spent it on electronic voting machines that aren't worth the price they would fetch for scrap. Currently, there is a bill making its way through Congress that actually would ban all electronic voting machines by 2012, but there's a question of whether local government or the feds would cover the cost of the switchover. If there is no money to replace them, local election officials may be hanging on to their pretty but quirky machines with a grip that belies their value.

Ominous rumblings are heard from swing states such as Pennsylvania where electronic voting machines similar to those that caused problems in Sarasota, Florida, will be in use by some one third of the voters. These machines produce no paper record of the voter's decision and have been suspected in previous elections of losing thousands of votes. Have they, or have they not? No one knows for sure, but the undervote is so out of line with comparable elections that they are highly suspect. The Electoral College votes in question? 21.

What happened with this initiative to "modernize" elections, and why is technology getting such a black eye? It goes back to administration of the tools that the government decided would help update our antiquated manual processes. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act that authorized $3.8 billion in federal spending. A substantial portion of the funds were allocated to the states to replace their punch-card and lever voting machines and make polling places more accessible to the disabled. The states were not obliged to purchase computerized voting systems, but in order to get any money, they had to promise to replace their punch-card and lever machines by the first federal election in 2006. Many now regret they didn't take the money and use it to buy reliable and auditable optical scanning systems. Instead, they went for the machines that resemble an automated teller machine. Bad choice. Even the electronic machines that produce a paper record of a voter's selections and are designed to answer questions during an election recount have been found to fail or jam often enough to throw a close election. The operative failure rate published by journalists looking into the problem is around 10 percent.

What the government failed to do, however, is set scientifically sound standards for these machines before they made the money available to buy them. In the characteristic low-regulation, no-regulation climate of the current administration, private vendors were permitted to design and sell machines using proprietary hardware and software produced in the absence of any mathematically sound security standards that apply to other federal agencies, such as the FAA or DOD.

The result has been a setback for electronic voting machines and a setback for technology that hopefully one day will allow a greater percentage of the population to participate in the democratic process. In the meantime, there is insufficient time left for states and counties to reverse their decision and escape their commitments to electronic voting machines. The ship is in motion, and there is no getting off now.

For those who thought the problem through earlier and got good advice, the technology of choice by security experts in the know is a ballot similar to the ones we used in grade school. You fill in the little circles on a paper ballot and then a computer scans the marks. Hey, it is computerized; it's just not as slick as what you are used to at your bank. But then, look at what's happening to the banks. Maybe someone should consider returning to the old tried and true ledger book.