EDITORIAL EVERY VOTE COUNTS? ELECTION MACHINERY AROUSES SUSPICIONS.

FOR $25 million, Los Angeles County now has a new InkaVote Plus voting system. That should, in theory anyway, make our elections more reliable and fair.

But not everyone is so hopeful.

You see, the software that counts the votes is proprietary information, so it can't be scrutinized by the public at large. We just have to take it on faith and governmental assurance that the company that makes the equipment is aboveboard and honest.

Which isn't all that easy, seeing the company, Election Systems & Software, is majority-owned by an international gambling firm based in Hong Kong. And when people think of fair elections, they don't usually think of China.

All of which has election watchdog groups like Black Box Voting suspicious.

But the alternatives aren't obvious. Publicizing the software code would carry its own set of risks. Most significantly, it would make life a lot easier for would-be hackers. And the pre-eminent American voting-systems manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems, is under a cloud of controversy of its own.

It's enough to make us nostalgic for the old punchcards -- which, by the way, served California just fine for decades. But after the election 2000 Florida debacle, state and federal officials rushed to upgrade all voting equipment, even though California's punchcard system had none of the problems that wreaked such havoc in Florida.

In the zeal to do ``something'' as quickly as possible, California replaced a perfectly good system with a newer and pricier, but not necessarily better, one.

Only time will tell whether in the rush to avert a ``crisis,'' we've created one where one never before existed.