Dan Rather

In little more than a year, Americans will go to the polls to elect a new president. We've been hearing a lot in the news about the Republican and Democratic candidates, the horse race, and even about the issues. One thing we haven't heard much about, though, is whether any of these things will really matter once we cast our votes. We haven't heard the question asked, and we certainly haven't got the answers.

During the past eight months, your reporter and producers at HDNet's 'Dan Rather Reports' have been looking into the mechanics of voting: voting machines, touch screens and paper ballots. We delved into some of the questions surrounding a contested election - for Florida's 13th Congressional District - in 2006 in which some 18,000 voters registered no preference at all. We even dug back into the 2000 presidential-election mess in that same state.

When we started asking questions of the people who made the voting machines and punch cards on which millions of votes were cast and registered, the answers we got were, at the very least, deeply troubling. Troubling in their assertions, and in their implications. Former employees of voting machine and card manufacturers told us that defects that could potentiall or nullify votes were brought to the attention of management, but were ignored.

If, as these whistle-blowers allege, defective machines and punch cards made their way into polling places, did they change the course of elections?

It may well be impossible to ever answer this question satisfactorily. Besides, elections that took place seven years ago, or even last year, are fait accompli. You can't change the past.

What about our future

But what about the future? After the 2000 election fiasco, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which, among other things, allocated many millions of taxpayer dollars to help states purchase new voting systems. You paid for these machines, and, depending on where you live, Election Day 2008 might well find you using them to cast your votes for president, U.S. representatives and city council. In light of past elections and what you've read above, don't you deserve some assurances that your vote will be recorded accurately - or even recorded at all?

Unless you feel inclined to take manufacturers at their word that all is well heading into '08, you will find that assurances are hard to come by. Much of the nuts and bolts of the new age of voting machines is protected from public scrutiny because companies claim that elements such as computer code represent 'trade secrets'.

Another way of looking at this is that companies' right to protect their profits is trumping the public's right to know.

A probing, vigilant press can only go so far. Journalists can't force companies to testify or turn over records; unlike prosecutors or Congress, we are not armed with subpoena power. So maybe it's high time for those who can compel answers to start asking the tough questions.

We are a nation that is divided politically. It doesn't get much discussed, but one of the factors that have made this division particularly bitter since 2000 is the sense among many that the process of voting - the very levers of democracy - may have failed us. Voting is essentially an act of faith, and our faith in voting has been sorely tested.

The time to shore up that faith is now, before the next election, not after. To do otherwise is to put the bedrock of our American experiment at risk.