For reliable voting results, look abroad

In the eyes of the rest of the world, American democracy is a wonderful thing: The wonder is how it can work.

As US voters used punch cards, levers, touch screens, and paper ballots to elect their new president Tuesday - while lawyers stood by to challenge the results - voters in younger democracies marveled at the anachronistic complexity of the US system, and took pride in their modernity.

Since 1950, 95 nations have adopted this form of government. As the professed beacon and chief promoter of democratic rights around the world, the US has funded programs and sent electoral observers to pass judgment on the fairness of the process.

But since the contested election of 2000, the US system is seen by these new democracies - and older ones - as less credible.

Whether they use ticks on ballot papers, buttons on touch-pads, or hand-held bar code readers, foreign voters enjoy one advantage over their US counterparts: Within each country, voters cast their ballots using just one method, and those ballots are counted uniformly.

"If you don't have uniformity and harmonized laws, if there is no equality in the way you treat each vote, you are bound to have conflicts which don't arise when there is the same treatment for all votes," says Joram Rukambe, an elections expert with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an inter-governmental body in Stockholm.

In no democracy can all voting mistakes be eliminated, say electoral experts. But if voters' trust in their system is strong, they can put up with the occasional irregularity.

In the US, since the bitterly contested result of the 2000 presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court, that trust is no longer universal, says Mr. Rukambe. "When the popular vote and the electoral college vote are in conflict, very fundamental questions are raised about who won," he says.

In Europe, on the other hand, "you have elections with a high level of trust and confidence that they are working after years of experience," he adds.

Even new systems in young democracies can generate that trust. In Brazil, for example, which emerged from military dictatorship in 1985, all of the country's 121 million voters use electronic touch-pads in all of their elections.

Voters key in the number that corresponds to the candidate they support, check the photograph of the candidate that appears, and hit the "confirm" button. The "electronic urns" are small and can run on car batteries, which makes them usable in remote parts of the Amazon jungle.

Results of national elections are known within five hours of the polls closing, says Armando Cardoso, an official with the Supreme Electoral Court.

Brazilians trust their system: Since it was first used in 1996, no major election result has been challenged. "The security of confidence in the electronic urns has not been questioned," says Mr. Cardoso.

Challenges are rare also in Japan, where a long history of resolving disputes by consensus, and detailed rules on how to deal with contested ballots, sort out most problems.

For national elections, Japanese voters put a mark next to the name of the party of their choice, and then must write the full name of their preferred candidate. Though this raises problems of illegible scrawl, vote counters are flexible: they will register a vote even if they can make out only the candidate's first or last name, for example. Nor does any vote go to waste: If two candidates have the same name, an incomplete ballot will be shared between them proportional to the number of valid votes each has received.

No such confusion is possible in the world's the largest democracy, India. Earlier this year, 387 million voters there turned out for national parliamentary elections, all using electronic voting machines for the first time.

The simple Indian machines, carried by donkey or Indian Air Force helicopter to the more remote parts of the country, required voters just to punch the button next to the name and symbol of their party of their choice.

The elections were widely regarded as freer and fairer than previous votes, partly because of the voting machines. However, "technology by itself is not enough," says M.J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age and a veteran political observer.

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