E-VOTE.(The Talk of the Town)

Nothing excites an electoral conspiracy theorist like electronic voting machines. There's the latest foul-up in Florida (eighteen thousand votes lost in the Thirteenth District in November), or the Princeton professor--you can watch him on YouTube--who in less than a minute hacks into a voting machine and plants software redirecting votes from candidate "George Washington" to "Benedict Arnold." In 2002, the federal government mandated that states upgrade their voting systems. New York is among the last in the country to do so--the slowness, depending on whom you ask, derives either from caution or from incompetence. In the meantime, the city's Board of Elections has called in an unlikely authority: the voting public.

A couple of weeks ago, a notice appeared in local papers announcing that all voting-machine venders being considered for a state contract would give a demonstration of their wares in Staten Island. The event was part of an "American Idol"-like series of shows around the city, to culminate in a hearing at which voters will voice their opinions about the machines. Up for consideration, devices that would make a spy shiver: Avante's VOTE-TRAKKER EVC308-FF; ES&S's Model 100 and AutoMARK; Diebold's AccuVote-OS and AutoMARK VAT; and, finally, Sequoia's AVC Advantage Plus and Optech Insight.

On a recent Thursday evening, about twenty voters assembled in the Juror Room of the Staten Island courthouse. A few canes and one oxygen tank rested in the aisles as Gene Seets, of Election Systems & Software, introduced the new M100. "Wow, this is kind of scary!" he said, tapping the microphone. No laughs. "O.K., so I'm a poll worker on Election Day. What do I do?" Seets ran his hand over the M100, which looks like a black photocopying machine. He walked through the process: poll worker uses a key card to open a panel in the side of the machine; machine produces a zero tape (like a grocery-store receipt, which shows that no votes have been recorded); poll worker checks the settings ("Time's right, date's right, year's right--we must have an election!"). The voter marks a paper ballot with a pen and feeds it into a scanner. "And that's the ES&S M100!" Seets said. "I don't think I've ever done this demonstration and had ...