Reporter: Nick Lazaredes:
PROTESTERS: I have a vote! I have a vote!

LINDA JOHNSON, NAT’L ASSOC FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP): The state of Florida and the US, we’re being monitored by the world because I guess everyone is saying, "Are they going to get this right this time?"

SINGLE PROTESTER: Say what?

PROTESTERS (All): Let’s go vote!

SINGLE PROTESTER: Say what?

PROTESTERS: (All) Let’s go vote!

COURTNEY STRICKLAND, ACLU: Florida has not entirely put behind it its shameful racist history, and that’s a reality, and there has been in this country, a history of intimidation and voter suppression, particularly of African Americans.

DR MICHAEL WERTHEIMER, COMPUTER SECURITY EXPERT: What I would argue is that there’s a vested interest in many, many people to change an election, whether they’re outside of our country or inside. The motivation is there and where there’s a will, and there’s a way, that marriage has always happened.

WOMAN: Get out and vote! Get out and vote!

In Florida, perhaps more than in any other part of America, it is true to say that every vote counts. In 2000, George W. Bush won the presidential election thanks to only a few hundred votes cast in one Florida county. Now one of the biggest and most hotly contested of the swing states is once again the battleground on which the country’s next president may be decided.

JANET RENO, FORMER US ATTORNEY-GENERAL: This state has shown so clearly how one vote can begin to make the difference. Make sure you reach out to every single person. The man at the vegetable counter in the grocery store, the person - your aunt you haven’t seen in 15 years, call her and find out if she’s voting. Make sure she votes.

PROTESTERS: Let’s go vote! Let’s go vote!

Last week, over 30 different states opened their polls for early voting and, in Miami, thousands of voters, many of them black, turned out in droves.

MAN: C’mon, all souls to the polls. We got more comin’. C’mon, they’re fillin’ it up. There’s going to be lines, there’s going to be early voting like November 4, 2004 no more. All souls to the polls.

This officially non-partisan rally was a response to the political and legal drama played out in Florida after the last election.

WOMAN: No fuzzy ballots!

Prior to 2000, no-one would have imagined that the result of a presidential election could come down to the wire like it did in Florida’s Palm Beach county.

PROTESTERS: We want Bush!

The drama was caused by ballots from old-style punch-card voting machines. As officials struggled to make sense of the dimpled, hanging and pregnant chads, manual recounts were first ordered, and then halted.

KAREN HUGHES, BUSH CAMPAIGN 2000: This manual recount process is fundamentally flawed, and is no longer recounting, but is distorting, reinventing and miscounting the true intentions of the voters of Florida.

WARREN CHRISTOPHER, GORE CAMPAIGN 2000: If Governor Bush truly believes that he has won the election in Florida, he should not have any reason to doubt or to fear to have the machine count checked by a hand count.

When the count was eventually stopped by the courts, George Bush had won the presidency with just 537 votes. To avoid a repeat of the confusion in 2000, billions of dollars have been spent on a high-tech upgrade of America’s voting systems. And next week, nearly 40% of the entire country will be voting on computerised machines. At the Miami Elections Department, workers are completing their final tests. Seth Kaplan knows that over the next few weeks their efforts will be closely watched by election monitors from around the world.

SETH KAPLAN, MIAMI ELECTIONS DEPT: Definitely - certainly, what happened in 2000, folks from all over the world quite literally are here, and we know that they’ll be here and we think it’s great, because this time, certainly we have every reason to believe everything is going to go very well and we look forward to everybody from Australia and everybody else in the world going back home and telling everybody how well everything went here in Miami.

But if officials had hoped that electronic voting would prove less controversial than punch-card machines, they were wrong. Although the machines are touted as the most secure voting system ever created, critics say that, in fact, they pose a serious threat to the democratic process.

DR MICHAEL WERTHEIMER: Let me really drive home this point - if you make a mistake on a paper ballot, OK, you lose your vote. You make a mistake and have the equivalent of an electronic chad, you can lose a million votes. It can happen in the blink of an eye.

Mathematician and computer expert Michael Wertheimer is one of America’s top code-breakers working at the US National Security Agency for two decades before branching out into the corporate sector. Last year he was hired by the state of Maryland to examine electronic voting machines supplied by the company Diebold and he soon discovered some major flaws.

DR MICHAEL WERTHEIMER: Each of these computers - I call them computers, they call them touch-screen terminals - has a locked compartment that controls the ability to reboot the machine, that has all the memory that’s storing everybody’s vote. That little compartment has a lock on it, which looks just like a file lock. One of our guys, who had no experience, picked the lock in 10 seconds with his ballpoint pen. Then we found out that the key that unlocks it is identical for all 16,000 Diebold terminals. So every key is a master key. So you have 16,000 keys running about, all of which open any of the 16,000 locks. One of our guys popped open this little locked compartment and found there was a jack that you can hook a keyboard up to. He just connected the keyboard, he hit one button on the keyboard and up on the screen came a menu that allowed him to become the supervisor without knowing the password. He was able to read off all the keys inside the device - the keys that do the encryption, the keys that the administrator uses to type in his password. All was revealed. He was able to delete votes, start votes, and he was able to do it all by picking the lock in 10 seconds and getting access to the machine.

Despite the concerns about computer voting fraud and low security, officials at the Miami Elections Department say they have all the bases covered.

SETH KAPLAN: In the tabulation room right behind us, you see the people working in there, you can’t even get on the Internet in that room, again it’s a security measure to make sure that, in fact, these kind of things can’t happen so all the questions that people have, we are aware of them and we have taken measures to address those questions. And I want to point out that I mean we may work at the Election Department but first and foremost, we’re voters, we’re citizens, we care very deeply about this process from that standpoint and certainly, we wouldn’t implement anything with which we ourselves were not comfortable, as first and foremost citizens we’re not just employees here.

THERESA LE PORE: We have 155 variations of the ballot for this election November 2, so...

When the system fails, it’s the election officials themselves who bear the brunt of public anger. There is no better example of this than Theresa Le Pore, elections supervisor in Florida’s Palm Beach county.

THERESA LE PORE: There are circles next to the candidates’ names. All the voter has to do is touch anywhere in the box. A check mark appears in the circle of their choice and the rest of the circles disappear which eliminates over-voting - voting for more than the number of candidates allowed.

Four years ago, it was Le Pore who designed the confusing punch-card ballot that led to thousands of people voting for the opposite candidate to the one they had intended.

THERESA LE PORE: Hindsight’s 20-20, and I’ll never do it again.

She also played a key role in halting the vote recount. She’s been described as the most hated woman in America.

THERESA LE-PORE: There’s a segment of the population that feels that I did it on purpose, which I did not obviously do it on purpose, I would never put anybody through the torture I’ve gone through over the last four years. But we’ve come a long way in trying to make things better and to improve everything. There’s still people out there that still blame me for what happened, I get blamed for 9/11, that’s my fault, the war in Iraq’s my fault, anything that happens is my fault because I put the wrong man in the White House is what it boils down to. It’s very unfortunate, it’s even cost me my job.

Like many election supervisors in Florida, Le Pore’s position is an elected one and just last month she was voted out. She’ll remain in her job until the end of the year, but Le Pore remains bitter about her experience.

REPORTER: Where is all this coming from?

THERESA LE PORE: The Democratic Party. And basically what it boils down to is I won’t kowtow to them, I won’t do what they want me to do, I’m going to follow the law and do what I think is best for all voters in this county, not just a select few, and they don’t like that, and have never liked it, which is why I have never gotten really involved with partisan politics.

But Theresa Le Pore’s troubles are not over yet. The day early voting started in Palm Beach County, her mainframe computer system broke down, causing lengthy delays. And this wasn’t the first or most serious problem encountered with Le Pore’s new system. The computerised voting machines were first challenged in the courts two years ago, during council elections in the city of Boca Raton.

EMIL DANCIU, FMR MAYOR, BOCA RATON: It was a 17-point lead the last week of the campaign. When the campaign finally came, we were there, we had people, all our people were out voting and the word was good, "Danciu is going to win" and so forth.

Emil Danciu was Mayor of Boca Raton for much of the 1980s so when he decided to run for city councillor in 2002, he was well placed for victory. In fact, several polls, including exit polls, had him way ahead of his nearest rival, but on election day a curious thing happened with the voting machines.

EMIL DANCIU: We had 12 people who came in and gave affidavits and said that they - either they didn’t think their vote got counted, or said "I pushed 1 and number 2 lit up." Also another one’s machine froze when they voted, and the worker, poll-worker came and pulled the plug and he plugged it back in again and the screen was cleared. Was that vote lost or was it not lost? Who knows what happened to it.

Danciu lost the election. According to the computer, it was by thousands of votes. With reports streaming in about faulty machines, Danciu filed a lawsuit challenging the result, and was invited to attend Theresa Le Pore’s office with a court-certified computer expert.

EMIL DANCIU: She went in to Theresa Le Pore’s office with us when we were having our lawsuit, and she said, "I can trick the machine, Mrs Le Pore." So she said, "Let’s see you," so the specialist pressed 1 and 3 and 2 lit up only, and Theresa Le Pore said, "You slipped your hand, that slippery," and she says, "Well, watch me again very closely." She pushed 1 and 3 - 2 lit up, she pushed 4 and 6 - and 5 lit up. And Theresa Le Pore said, "Oh, that must be a faulty machine." It was her sample machine to teach people about how it works. (laughs) That was the bottom line there, so that’s how things go.

With no paper trail to verify what actually happened, Emil Danciu lost his case, but it has sparked a flurry of similar lawsuits demanding the right to a back-up system to record a vote on paper. But Theresa Le Pore remains adamant that her computerised voting machines are fail-safe.

THERESA LE PORE: So he lost by thousands of votes and it wasn’t even close and he’s blaming the machines because all his friends and all these people told him that they voted for him.

That they told him that they voted for him, but that somebody else’s name came up.

THERESA LE PORE: No, actually...that was not... we checked the machines, and checked the machines and that never happened. They actually voted for somebody else, but they didn’t want him to know that they didn’t vote for him because they didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

But incidents like the one in Boca Raton highlight the impossibility of resolving disputes over votes that are cast on computers.

DR MICHAEL WERTHEIMER: You’re much, much worse off than you were in 2000. There’s no audit trail. There’s no ability to at least look at a dimpled card, have an argument over it, and say yay or nay. This is an electronic record, it’s just a series of zeros and ones stored on a media, and how that was stored may have been broken, the software may be broken. There’s no way to go back and fix that, shy of calling for another vote.

Beyond the fears of an electronic election catastrophe, there is another shadow looming over American democracy. In many states, including Florida, hundreds of thousands of citizens will be denied the right to vote.

COURTNEY STRICKLAND, ACLU: In Florida, a person with a felony conviction loses the right to vote, often for life, unless the governor and the cabinet choose to give that right to vote back as a form of clemency, like a pardon, for example. And what that means is that in Florida, there are more than 600,000 people who have served all their time, they’ve paid their debt to society, and yet they still can’t exercise their most fundamental right in democracy.

Courtney Strickland works for the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida. She says that because 40% of disqualified felons are black, the law unfairly targets African Americans.

COURTNEY STRICKLAND: Florida’s voting ban against people with past felony convictions has been in our state constitution since 1868 - that’s the constitution Florida had to adopt in order to be readmitted into the US after the Civil War. That means that particular law comes from the same time as poll taxes, literacy tests, and all the other mechanisms that were used to prevent African Americans from being able to vote after the end of slavery.

Linda Johnson is from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. She believes that hundreds of thousands of black voters in Florida are being disenfranchised by antiquated and unfair laws.

LINDA JOHNSON: It’s worrying me, and it’s making me more persistent in making sure that I stand firm for what is right. It does worry me, and I’m not sure of what is behind it, and why is it happening.

Johnson is deeply concerned that many blacks who are not felons will also be prevented from voting. She says the law is enforced so crudely, that anyone sharing the same name as a felon is also denied the right to vote.

LINDA JOHNSON: The felons list is so vague - it only specifies and states the person’s name and the county so there’s nothing there for us to be able to identify that particular person because it does not specify the birth date, it does not have anything related to the social security number, so if you have a common name such as John Brown in Palm Beach county on a felons list, how many John Browns do we have in Palm Beach county?

BOB GRAHAM, FLORIDA SENATOR: We are the sunshine state. The sun is shining on us today, the sun will shine on all America when John Kerry is the next president of the United States of America.

In the past month, both John Kerry and George W. Bush have seen more of Florida than most Floridians.

JOHN KERRY, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: So here’s the deal, south Florida. I’m here in the state of Florida and George Bush is in the state of denial.

They know that whoever takes Florida stands a good chance of becoming the next president. But questions about how the vote was cast are likely to cloud the election outcome. Teams of Democrat and Republican lawyers have already been assembled to challenge the vote. And of even more concern, some critics fear that weaknesses in the electoral system could be deliberately exploited.

DR MICHAEL WERTHEIMER: I’ve got a group of smart guys, very smart guys, who feel you don’t have to be that smart to actually go in and genuinely change the election, given everything they know. I said, "Surely you’ll be caught doing this?" And they wrote down for me 10 scenarios I hadn’t even thought of, that is common lore in hacking communities, that I think would blow right through this election.

JOHN KERRY: Let’s make it happen. Thank you, and God bless you all.