哪种计票方式更可靠？

　　The American presidential election of 2000 was, to put it mildly, controversial. People still argue bitterly over whether George Bush truly won in Florida, the state whose electoral votes made him president even though he had garnered fewer votes nationwide than Al Gore, his main opponent.

　　The presidential election this November will be of crucial importance -- and once again, observers generally agree, very close. In addition, the Senate is split 51-49 in favor of the Republicans, so a shift of only two seats could either hand it to the Democrats or make it much likelier to cooperate with a right-wing Republican president. How can an accurate vote count be guaranteed?

　　It can't, at least not in an absolute sense. All voting systems are open to tampering and error. The easiest elections to audit are the least technically sophisticated: voting with paper ballots. However, as David Horsey points out in today's cartoon, ballot boxes can be "stuffed" -- and occasionally have been in America, in cities or counties under the control of one tightly disciplined and unscrupulous political organization. Today oversight committees and the press make ballot stuffing far less likely, as do private polls of people leaving voting stations: if the polls produce different results from the balloting, then something is fishy.

　　Why all this fuss with paper and pens and ballot boxes when machines can simplify the whole task? Actually, the trouble in Florida centred on the difficulty of reading ballots from voting machines. Ah, but we live in a high-tech era: why not go over to electronic voting using touch-screen systems or the internet? Because these electronic methods are far more open to manipulation, whether by mischief-minded hackers or political operatives who will stop at nothing to win. And if tampering occurs, a clean audit of the votes is impossible.

　　In the lower frame of his cartoon, David Horsey shows us what could happen if an irresponsible young fool hacked into a voting system. Nobody really thinks Canadians, of all people, are likely to be up to this sort of thing, least of all a Canadian from Winnipeg, that haven of innocence in the centre of Canada -- this is part of the humor of the cartoon. Nervous Democrats, however, have noticed two disquieting things about the companies that produce voting technology: their security precautions are inexcusably sloppy -- and the firms are mostly controlled by businessmen allied with the Republican Party.