IN EARLY JULY , Oakland congressional representative Barbara Lee asked the United Nations to oversee this year's presidential vote, saying, "My question is: if we attempt to ensure free and fair elections in other countries, why wouldn't we do the same for our own elections? Why wouldn't we want to encourage transparency in our elections process?"

Lee's bring-in-the-blue-helmets ploy was a hyperbolic publicity stunt, but she definitely had a point. The 2000 contest, was, after all, a meltdown of the democratic process, a farce that added the terms hanging chad and butterfly ballots to the popular lexicon, subtracted a large number of African Americans from the voter rolls, and cast the nation into its most profound constitutional crisis since Watergate.

And Lee is right to note that this year's election is shaping up to be a wee bit shaky as well.

In the wake of the Florida debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which provided $3.86 billion to replace ossified punch-card systems with silicon-based voting machines and improve voter education. Now gadflies and activists say the new machines, most notably touch-screen voting terminals, could prove as problematic as their analog predecessors.

A key issue with computerized voting technology is that many of the machines – which are manufactured by several different companies and are programmed to meet different state requirements – don't generate a paper audit trail, but instead recorded all votes on computer hard drives.

So what's the problem with going 100 percent digital? Well, a paper trail provides proof that all votes are accurately recorded, that nobody hacked into the machine, and that there wasn't some technical malfunction. In the event of a recount, a paper trail means the ability to do a ballot-by-ballot tally.

"We see two different concerns," said Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org, a San Francisco-based nonpartisan nonprofit. "One has to do with malfunctions and errors with e-voting technology. The other is the potential for fraud."

California secretary of state Kevin Shelley shares Doherty's concerns. Shelley stepped into the national spotlight last year when he ordered all counties to employ technology that'll spit out a paper audit trail, setting a 2006 deadline for the transition.

But this ain't 2006, and not everybody lives in the Golden State. This year nearly 30 percent of the country will cast their votes using electronic machines, according to the Election Reform Information Project, another nonprofit group. So far the track record of the devices is mixed.

"We've had 18 incidents where there were problems with e-voting machines in the past couple of years," Electronic Frontier Foundation legal affairs director Cindy Cohn told the Bay Guardian. Cohn is involved in "four or five" lawsuits to halt the use of certain touch-screen machines. "And those are only the serious problems," she said. "These machines don't work very well. They're essentially prototypes."

During last year's gubernatorial recall election, for example, balky e-voting terminals in Alameda County forced some poll workers to revert to provisional paper ballots and kept some people waiting for hours to vote, according to reports in the Oakland Tribune. (San Francisco uses optical scanners, which read paper ballots, thus leaving material for a recount.)

It gets worse. Officials in suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, used $3.5 million in federal funds to buy nearly 1,000 WINvote brand touch-screen machines from a Texas company called Advanced Voting Solutions. Those machines pretty much shit the bed in their first major outing, with 154 of them screwing up during elections last November, a debacle that delayed results for 21 hours. And there have been countless similar tales across the country.

Early this year south Florida experienced another polling-place disaster, when Broward County's new e-voting machines apparently failed to record 134 votes cast in a special Jan. 6 election for a state legislature seat. The contest was decided by 12 votes. E-voting companies say the fears about their systems are overblown. "The touch-screen technology that our clients are using today has never been more accurate, reliable, and easier for voters to use," said Becky Vollmer, spokesperson for Election Systems and Software, manufacturer of the terminals used in Broward. She described the missing votes as a nonissue.

But after compiling scores of similar anecdotes, Doherty and colleagues at VerifiedVoting.org are organizing a national election monitoring team with the aim of thwarting more meltdowns this November. Several other organizations are also putting together poll-watching teams. "We're urging technology professionals to volunteer as poll monitors on election day," Doherty said, adding that his group is hoping to enlist an army of 10,000 geeks who'll be dispatched to hot spots in real time.

A.C. Thompson