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Electronic voting will play a pivotal role in this election, but the technology is far from mature. Important questions remain unanswered about the durability, design and security of the new voting machines.

Millions of voters across the United States will cast their votes this year on a touch screen that produces no paper trail. Here in California, 10 counties will use such machines.

If they work as designed, the new electronic machines will be more accurate and easier to use than the ancient punch-card system we had before.

And if this were any other election, that would be good enough for me.

But this time, the stakes are unusually high. This election is expected to be one of the closest races in the history of the nation. Both the Republican and Democratic parties have teams of lawyers standing by, waiting to challenge the result at the slightest sign of error or impropriety.

If these machines don’t work flawlessly, the 2000 Florida voting travesty might start to look like a cakewalk. Even a handful of miscounted or discarded votes could lead to weeks of litigation and a scramble to recount votes that do not exist in any real physical form.

Without a paper trail, and considering the tight nature of the race, problems which would otherwise be merely annoying could become show-stoppers.

The most simple problem – and most likely – is that some voters will be confused by the new touch-screen system. The Austin Chronicle reported that officials in Texas received about a dozen complaints from early voters who may have hit “enter” on the screen when they meant to hit “next page.” That error resulted in their vote defaulting to Bush/Cheney rather than Kerry/Edwards.

Glitches are another possible problem. Anyone who has ever used a computer can remember staring at the monitor in utter frustration while it fails to respond. Heat problems, power failures, damage from misuse and good old computer crashes are all definite possibilities.

Ominously, a central vote-tabulating computer crashed during a test-run in Palm Beach County, Florida two weeks ago. Officials were unable to explain the crash, but said damage from a hurricane may have caused air conditioners to fail, leading to overheating.

Finally, there are concerns about partisan conspiracies and malicious hackers.

In 2003, security experts found the code for Diebold, a brand of voting machines, on the Internet. They analyzed the code and found at least 23 possible aspects that needed improvement.

Besides the shortcomings in the code itself, the fact that the code was on the Internet raises other concerns – what if a hacker who was not so civic-minded found the code and could identify and exploit weaknesses in it? Anyone who has ever had a computer virus knows even the biggest companies tend to be one step behind the hackers.

With the old voting system, local officials could conduct manual recounts of individual ballots if something seemed wrong. With the paperless system, all our faith must reside in the software and hardware of the voting computer.

The lack of a manual recount option also means we must entrust the makers of the machines with democracy. In 2003, Walden O’Dell, the CEO of the largest electronic voting machine company, said he wanted to help the campaign of President Bush. He intended for his comments to be harmless – he was not referring in any way to his role as the Diebold CEO – but it was a reminder that electronic voting systems are truly “black boxes.”

Inherent in the system is a catch-22: Making the voting software code public could make the job of hackers easier, but keeping it private means voters will never know exactly how their vote is counted.

This pivotal presidential election is not the best time to test new voting machines. I agree that it is time to move away from punch-card voting, but there needs to be a paper trail, and the systems have to be thoroughly tested and secured.

Lazzaro is a fourth-year political science and psychology student and editorial development director for the Daily Bruin. E-mail him at dlazzaro@media.ucla.edu