DRY RUN.(The Talk of the Town)

Kwesi Addae, a fifty-three-year-old former political-science professor from Ghana and the founder of Pollwatch Africa, has monitored elections in half a dozen shenanigan-prone countries, including Togo, Nigeria, and Guinea-Bissau. So it's not surprising that, back in November of 2000, he paid some attention to the events that were unfolding in Florida. "We were so used to looking at the United States as a paragon of democratic virtues," he said the other day. Then came Bush v. Gore and, as the President might say, everything changed. "We caught you," Addae said, his face breaking into an impish smile. "You're no different from us." This time around, Addae, as one of twenty foreign election observers brought here this month by the left-leaning human-rights group Global Exchange, is inspecting the creaky mechanics of American democracy at close hand. He signed up for the two-week mission, he said, "out of fascination."

In Africa, Addae had seen phantom polling stations, ruling-party rent-a-mobs, ballots bought with beer. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for the iVotronic touch-screen voting system. The iVotronic is the latest in electoral technology, a light, flat-screen computer that will be used this November in parts of Florida, among other places. Addae encountered the device on the second day of the mission, at the Washington, D.C., offices of ifes, an international election-assistance group. Inside the ifes library, which was decorated with election posters from Bosnia, Bolivia, and elsewhere, the delegation was offered the chance to test the new machine.

The observers crowded around. "You're quite fortunate to be able to touch and feel the same thing that those voters will be using on Election Day," a salesman from Election Systems & Software, the machine's manufacturer, said. Addae squeezed closer for a better look. He wore an American-flag pin on the lapel of his rumpled blue blazer.

"Let's vote," Addae said. He craned his neck as two other observers took their turns at the touch screen: Neerja Chowdhury, an Indian journalist who wore a flowing red kurta and shawl, and Somsri Hananuntasuk, a petite Thai woman who, for the purposes of show-and-tell, had brought along a joblos, an icepick-like device used to punch ballots in Indonesia. (Hananuntasuk's next trip will be to Afghanistan, for the election on October 9th. "This one is much easier," she said.) Addae was next. He bellied up to the machine and poked at the screen. Nothing happened. Someone handed him a small cartridge--a "personalized electronic ballot," or P.E.B. Addae examined the cartridge quizzically, then fumbled as he tried to insert it into the machine. "Put it back in for just a second," an observer named David MacDonald, a former ...