By A.C. Thompson and David Martinez

THIS ELECTION WAS marred by some truly egregious, easily preventable screwups in the voting process, further proof that the nuts and bolts of democracy are severely corroded. The problems may not add up to a defeat of George W. Bush, as some blogging lefties argue, but in a lot of ways it looks like we narrowly avoided another Florida-style debacle.

"The media called this a 'smooth transition' and a 'mandate' and moved on," said Timothy Rusch, a spokesperson for Demos, a nonprofit, nonpartisan election reform group. "But there were hundreds of thousands of system failures. Those failures show there's more need for reform."

Here are three key lessons:

1. A democracy where every vote isn't counted isn't a democracy.

On Nov. 4 a column by muckraking journo Greg Palast started zinging around the Internet (www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php). His take on the election? John Kerry really won Ohio – and the election – but was denied the victory by those same archaic punch-card voting systems Florida made infamous in the last presidential election.

As Palast wrote on TomPaine.com, a liberal Web site, "Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded." They weren't recorded because of "spoilage," jargon for paper ballots where the voter's intentions are unclear – i.e., dimpled, pregnant, or hanging chads, three terms we all hoped never to hear again. Creaky punch-card systems remain in use in Ohio and in many other states.

Now, let us stipulate: Palast, the reporter who busted Florida officials for kicking eligible black voters off the rolls in 2000, is a bombastic character with a tendency to connect the dots in speculative ways. And we don't necessarily buy his line that uncounted votes would skew so overwhelmingly for Kerry as to change the outcome (Palast reported that there were 247,672 spoiled ballots and that Bush's margin of victory was 136,483 votes).

But he's still got a point: voting experts agree that 2 to 3 percent of the ballots cast in each election don't get counted because of spoilage. A 2002 Harvard University study shows the rates of spoilage are worse in African American neighborhoods where older, less-reliable voting machines tend to be in use. This is galling. Mortifying. Disgusting. In a close election, punch-card machines could easily change the outcome.

2. Those crazy e-voting machines aren't ready for prime time.

On the other end of the techno spectrum, of course, are the controversial new touch-screen voting terminals. Going into this election, they had already spit out bunk results in Florida and Virginia. Alameda County has its own troubled history with e-voting, with technical snafus crippling some of the county's Diebold-brand touch screens during the March election.

So we wanted to see how things went down in the East Bay in this election. Defying prediction, the e-voting terminals seemed to work fine, and, at this point, there's no proof a squad of diabolical Republican hackers rigged them.

On Election Day, we visited several precincts in Oakland and Berkeley, as well as the county registrar's office, and didn't hear any horror stories. Felicia Strickland, a poll inspector at a precinct on the 400 block of 49th Street in north Oakland, reported no problems. But poll worker Peter Allison told us many voters were suspicious of e-voting machines and had requested paper provisional ballots. "They want a paper trail," he said.

Neither Allison nor anyone else we spoke with noticed any visible e-voting dysfunction.

But at 8:30 p.m., VerifiedVoting.org's Will Doherty painted a different picture. Via cell phone, Doherty informed us his group – established to "champion transparent, reliable, and publicly verifiable elections in the United States" – had received complaints of 1,164 "mechanical problems" nationwide and estimated 900 of those were digital-voting breakdowns. The most disturbing of these included machines that reportedly changed the voter's choice from Kerry to Bush. However, Doherty said he'd documented only a handful of these cases, about five nationwide.

"These are systemic problems," Doherty said, adding that none looked "substantial enough to affect the outcome of the presidential race, but we won't know until the last votes are counted."

It turns out the final vote tally wasn't particularly precise. A few days after Black Tuesday, on Nov. 5, the Associated Press revealed a full-blown foul-up: "An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus [Ohio]."

While it's not eight million votes, it's definitely scary, and it's the kind of debacle that further erodes our already diminished faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. If the machines bungled the numbers in one place, how do we know they didn't screw up in other places? How do we know they haven't been hacked? Touch screens that don't generate a paper audit trail – i.e., something to recount in the event of a dispute – create a legitimate fear that elections are being rigged.

So we've got ancient punch-card machines that void people's votes and sketchy touch-screen terminals that can't be trusted. Why, exactly, is it so hard to build reliable voting machines? We live in a nation that can send robot ATVs to Mars, and we can't get it together to equip every precinct with some decent voting technology?

3. Basic competency should be a requirement for election officials.

What's up with the apparent inability of scores of state and county election officials to perform basic functions?

At the Election Protection call center here in San Francisco, the crew told us it was taking calls from people in numerous states saying they'd received their absentee ballots as late as Oct. 30. Given that slight time constraint, mail-in voters were turning to FedEx, which in turn was having trouble overnighting ballots to the P.O. boxes maintained by some county election offices – FedEx doesn't deliver to mailboxes.

The folks at VerifiedVoting.org put together a real-time, Web-based election-monitoring system (https://voteprotect.org/), along with a hotline for frustrated voters. The system received more than 19,000 reports of trouble at the polls, many of them about mundane organizational glitches – people who never got their absentee ballots, people who registered but were never added to the rolls, ex-cons who were eligible to vote but were turned away, etc.

And who could miss the footage of multi-hour lines at the polls in Ohio and other states? In a country where most folks can't even be bothered to vote under the best circumstances, doesn't it make sense to keep the process from turning into an Ernest Shackleton-type test of human endurance? The voting infrastructure in some counties, Rusch said, "completely buckled under this capacity, even though it had been anticipated for months."

You know, these are the sorts of things you'd think the world's wealthiest democracy could've sorted out a couple hundred years ago. As Rusch put it, "In literally every state in the country, machines broke down, there were provisional ballot shortages, voters were intimidated, ballots were not counted, there were discrepancies and gaps in some of the electronic balloting systems."

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