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chines that require voters to use a pen to mark a paper ballot, which an electronic machine then scans.
Both systems have experienced problems in elections. But when optical-scan machines misread ballots or miscalculate votes, election officials can re-scan the ballots or recount them by hand. Touch-screen votes, however, exist only in digital form, so officials can't know if a machine records votes inaccurately. Nor can they correct the problem after the fact if somehow they do discover that a machine has recorded votes inaccurately.
The controversy around e-voting began in September 2002 when Harris read an online article under the provocative headline, "Elections in America: Assume Crooks Are in Control."
Written by environmental activist Lynn Landes, the article was based partly on a 1992 book on election rigging called Votescam: The Stealing of America.
Landes said she realized that the right to vote was useless as long as she had no way of verifying that her vote was recorded accurately.
"When we're using lever machines, touch-screen voting machines or the Internet, we are not voting, the machine is voting," Landes said. "We're inputting our choice and hoping the machine is (recording it) correctly."
She was concerned that voting machines were closed to public scrutiny, and the people who made them were not subject to background checks.
"Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies," Landes wrote, suggesting that the Russian mafia could be behind U.S. elections and no one would know.
As it turned out, two of the top three companies did have foreign ties. Diebold Election Systems began as a Canadian firm called Global Election Systems before being purchased by Ohio-based Diebold Inc. in January 2002. And Sequoia Voting Systems is owned by two foreign firms -- 85 percent by De La Rue, a British company, and 15 percent by the Jefferson Smurfit Group of Ireland.
As for criminal activity, a Sequoia regional manager was indicted in Louisiana in 2001 for conspiring to commit money laundering and bribery, although he was never convicted. Philip Foster was accused of facilitating a 10-year kickback scheme between his brother-in-law and an election official involving millions of dollars in overcharges for voting equipment. But while the election official went to jail, Foster, who still works for Sequoia, received immunity for his testimony and is in the process of trying to get the charges expunged from his record.
Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles said the voting equipment in question wasn't Sequoia equipment, and that "Sequoia has never been under any investigation regarding the situation in Louisiana and absolutely no allegations of improper conduct have been directed at the company."
Tom Eschberger, a vice president for the largest voting firm, Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, was also involved in a bribery and kickback scheme, this one in Arkansas. Former Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen was convicted for his role in the crime, but Eschberger, like Foster, received immunity.
ES&S won't comment on the matter other than to say that Eschberger "wasn't prosecuted."
"I was casting a net out and challenging other people to look at this issue," said Landes, the environmental activist. "If I could find this much disturbing information in a short length of time, what could other people find?"
Harris was not the least bit interested in voting when she read Landes' article. She was a book publicist who promoted titles like They Told Me I Couldn't, a belly dancer's account of sword dancing through Colombia, and Belly Laughs, a collection of tales from belly dancers around the world.
But she was interested in investigations. She once had tracked the moves of an accountant who embezzled $80,000 from her PR business, and she had conducted background research on Bush's Rangers -- an elite
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