Election Night for the U.S. media is like the final lap of a long horse race. After months of sports-like coverage of the great dramatic contest between the top competitors and their teams, the media — especially TV news — go for a high-ratings night of number counting, colorful graphs and a decisive ending: the horses crossing the finish line.

It's the final act for campaign commentators who have dominated the airwaves for months. Each of the major networks puts together a team of experts in all aspects of vote counting, including pollsters, academics, exhausted campaign pundits, savvy party members and a new breed who manage and comment on the running tally displays — Election Night specialists. This year the TV-news approach collapsed. The media 'experts' vapid play-by-play turned Election Night into a fiasco.

But all the hot air has never focused on the crucial and central issues of the voting process itself. The press more-or-less knew but paid little attention to the fact that polling places in the United States are under the control of states, counties and municipalities that spend little money for vote counting. Most of the workers, party monitors and election-commission staff are volunteers or low paid, and many have little training. The media experts simply overlooked what is now clear: There are defects in the election process that collectively are serious threats to our democracy

Election 2000 began to shed light on the big questions the talking heads have too long ignored, from how to handle the growing contributions of absentee ballots to what goes on inside the precinct voting centers. Are voting places poorly marked or recently moved? What should voters do if a police barricade or an accident keeps them from getting to the polling place? Inside the polling place are those trying to vote intimidated or encouraged? Are they being told how to validly mark ballots? How are the machines supposed to work, and what if they don't? What should election staff do if voters make a mistake on a ballot or cannot read English well? If they have a registration problem or are not registered at all? Which voters are likely to be poorly treated, discouraged and even turned away by bully boys or biased cops? Who is responsible for handling these matters? And how often do they happen?

During Election Day, are the people who handle, sort and store ballots well trained and nonpartisan? When voting ends do they know what to count? Do they know when, whether and how to interpret imperfectly filled-out ballots and when, where and how to send ballots for further storage or processing? How different are these procedures from precinct to precinct?

This year the final lap didn't end. The collective defects of the election process, normally invisible in the blur of the tallies, became starkly apparent in the long Florida count. We now know that many individuals who try to vote do not get their votes counted or, if counted, not as intended. Some of this is directly due to media know-it-alls calling elections based on erroneous data or too early. The rest is indirectly due to the media, who neither comprehend nor report on election-process defects. In most elections this does not seem to matter. Victories are by wide enough margins that people are happy to assume, absent any real information to the contrary, that the defects actually don't matter in the final outcome, but together somehow "average out." The media are happy to accept that whoever gets the most votes, obtained from the ballot counting procedures whatever they be, is the winner.

But these defects are not simply the margin of error. The definite flaws provide opportunities for fraud. And the media have never been ready, willing or able to cover any of it.

When the Florida vote stalemate brought these issues to light, the media were totally unprepared. Instead of seizing the moment to finally engage these fundamental questions of democracy, the media for the most part jumped on the tale of hanging chads and butterfly ballots, the minutia of the legal cases, the faults of technology.

The national media played up the story of the election as the failure of election machines, but as Stephen J. Simurda reports in the current Columbia Journalism Review, they've ignored the flaws in dozens of close elections around the country for many years, some caused by voting machines but many due to other contributing factors, such as large numbers of ballots ignored, poorly designed or improperly counted and other election process defects. The media never picked up the story, and consequently, officials who could have made a difference were given a pass to ignore it too.

In response to the Florida chaos, the United States will do some overhaul of the electoral system. The big outlay will be billions for new voting machines. It became obvious to the world that the most technologically advanced nation is still saddled with poorly designed voting machines. All kinds will be proposed, even the ancient lever-handled devices that New York City has used successfully since 1895. There will be one exception. No one will buy punch card machines after the Miami-Dade fiasco, with its dimpled and pregnant chads, so ridiculed by Republicans and media pundits.

Will the mainstream news media improve their Election Day performance in future years, or will they rely on official statements that all the defects have been eliminated by new voting machines and new procedures? It is unlikely that the system will be reformed to repair its deepest flaws, and new technical solutions may well raise new dangers.

Technologically, a screen-based microprocessor design may eventually emerge as the favorite. This type of machine has a lot of neat features. On the screen, voters will see their intentions confirmed, corrected and easy to spot in glorious color with helpful prompts and all kinds of nice stuff that the PC revolution has taught us to expect. Electronic devices can provide running tallies so that totals can be known at the precinct level within seconds after the local close. As the astounding capability of the Internet has taught us, national results too could be known within seconds, subject to varying closing times and the networking of all precincts. That would eliminate the need for the questionable accuracy of exit polls and the elaborate media vote-counting efforts on Election Night.

But there are problems, even at the precinct level, even with the simplest electronic voting machines. Before each election, someone has to input or upload the usual ballot data — the positions to be filled, the contestants and their party affiliation, instructions like "vote for three commissioners" and limitations such as how to use a keyboard or touch-screen for write-ins. Programmers who do this have to be trained by engineers. Equipment and software have to be designed and manufactured. A lot of manufacturers will push a lot of different designs.

Consider the electronic voting-machine salesman making a pitch to the election commissioner or to a party official or fundraiser. After describing all the neat features, the salesman might add: "Now on the back here is a little inconspicuous switch, which if you push to the left, regardless of what this machine tells the voter, will count the vote for the Democrat. If you push it to the right, the Republican gets the vote. Of course, we oppose the use of this switch. I know you'd never touch it. You' re ethical, but there are some buyers out there who consider that feature a plus, and it might be a factor in their purchase order decisions. If my company X didn't have this feature, our unethical competitors might get the order. What you do is up to you. We don't want to know about it."

Then his competitor might whisper: "X's feature is OK, but my company Y has something better. An on-off toggle is crude. It's easily spotted. Someone might wind up in jail. My machine has more than a toggle. It's controlled by a statistically biased random variable. It works like this. Suppose you decide your candidate in one contest needs a seven-point advantage, another one needs only a three point advantage. The machine introduces random changes that favorably bias the tallies by the amounts you have instructed. No one can ever find out that any vote was changed. The machine eliminates all traces."

Now we don't have to pick on the poor salesmen trying to make a living in a tough game or the company pandering to politicians perceived as unethical. Offers might be made to a programmer who loads the candidate data or an engineer who trains the programmers. A party hack or a foreign agent might hand an envelope to one of these people. And if the machines were networked, particularly if linked to the Internet, disrupting a U.S. national election could be the prized achievement of a hacker seeking to be the world's best.

Even if all of these shenanigans were outlawed, severely punished or never took place, another weakness of the electronic voting machine is this: If a recount is required because of a close vote, then printed copies of each ballot are desirable, both by the election commission and each voter, so that both can confirm that the voter's intentions were followed. If machines failed because of power failure or whatever, a back-up paper record would be absolutely necessary. Voters could keep their copies confidential or destroy them if concerned about privacy. The copies would only be useful in a recount, and if properly designed could be shown to an election official as proof positive of the voter's intention. To my knowledge, this extension to voting of the usefulness of purchase receipts for confirming transactions has not been used anywhere.

Since a paper record is necessary for back up, why not forget the machine altogether and just use a paper ballot? The difficulty of counting paper ballots has been greatly exaggerated. The Canadians completed their 2000 election count of 13 million votes, all paper ballots, in four hours, discrediting the myth that counting paper ballots is slow or difficult. The paper ballot would in fact be better, more reliable and accurate than any machine.

But _ back to the paper ballot is not the way the United States will go. We still have a love affair with technology, and we still believe that the solution to technological problems is more technology. As high-quality survey research by my organization, Americans Talk Issues, has shown, "we" is not so much the people of the United States, who will have little to say in the matter, as it is the decision makers, the political leaders and the accommodating mainstream news media. It will happen because the pricey decision for machines-over-voters comes from the need for, even the love of, lots of pork being spread around. Using the money to hire more precinct workers and train them better and for voter education and support would be a more desirable alternative. Enormous citizen pressure could make the desirable happen.

There are many other lessons to be learned from the election fiasco. Many will never be widely understood, but if you listen closely, you will hear them from now till the next election, unless you only listen to the mainstream media.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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