Out west in Washington state—not in a decisive state like Ohio or Florida—a state-court judge ruled last week that Governor Christine Gregoire, a Democrat and former state attorney general, had actually, and factually, won the governorship seven months ago. She won by a margin of 129 votes after the tallying of nearly 3 million ballots cast last November 2. It was a matter of a bungled ballot count, the judge ruled, nothing criminal.

But vote fraud and other problems in the 2004 election are still generating some news reports on the efforts of citizens' groups to investigate election abuses. So we asked our balloting specialist, the scholarly Margie Burns, a professor at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County, to give us a catch-up.

he Washington Spectator has already reported (in the April 15, 2005, issue) on an explosive affidavit by a Florida computer-software engineer, Clinton Curtis, stating that he was told in the fall of 2000 to develop software that could alter the final vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable.

Curtis said the vote-tampering program was requested by Tom Feeney, a Republican member of the U.S. House from central Florida and a former lobbyist for the computer company where Curtis worked. Feeney's office has said he would not comment on the affidavit.

Curtis said Feeney was very specific in his original request that (a) the program to accomplish this needed to be touch-screen capable; (b) that the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment; and (c) that the program must remain undetected even if the source code was inspected. The Curtis affidavit was dated December 6, 2004, and was posted on the Internet the same day.

On March 3, Clinton Curtis passed a lie detector test given to him by Tim Robinson, retired chief polygraph operator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, according to the St. Petersburg Times. According to the Times, Feeney has denied the accusations against him.

WHO'S WATCHING?—Curtis's story that he was ordered to conceal a vote-switching program in the "source code" is worrying because there are few or no safeguards in most states to prevent such tampering.

More and more states are turning to electronic touch-screen voting machines or to optical-scanning equipment, or both, to tabulate votes. Alan Dechert, president of the newly formed nonprofit Open Voting Consortium (OVC), points out that in November 2000 about 12 percent of all ballots in the U.S. were cast with secret software—"invisible" in Dechert's words.

In 2002, the number had grown to about 18 percent of U.S. voting machines, and in 2004 it was over 30 percent, Dechert says. "That's more than 30 million invisible ballots created with secret software in the most recent and controversial election."

According to Dechert. "Even where we have paper ballots, those are mostly counted with black boxes that are hard to audit."

Voting machine companies have refused to provide their source codes to investigators, claiming that they are proprietary information. The sellers of the vote-counting software have zealously guarded their programs from the public, from election officials, from everyone—on the dubious grounds that competitors could steal their ideas if the source codes were open to inspection. This argument is false, according to voting technology experts.

As pointed out by James M. Collier and Kenneth L. Collier in their 1992 book Votescam, the computers that did the vote count in November 1988 held in their inner workings small boxes that contained secret code that only the sellers of the computers could read.

The Collier brothers, who together investigated long-term vote fraud in Florida, are both deceased. Their book remains available at www.votescam.com or through Victoria House Press, P.O. Box 120, Taos, NM 87571.

IT'S NOT COMPLICATED—You may ask: what kind of software is required to count something as simple as a ballot? Can the programming be much more sophisticated than the workings of a computerized cash register at the supermarket or an automated bank-teller machine?