This story originally appeared in Worcester Magazine, August 24, 1988 and was named "Best Sports Story" of that year by the New England Press Association Awards.

CITY BOY IN THE BIG COUNTRY

Worcester's Ed Riley heads 2,700 miles west to launch a professional baseball career

By Jonathan Vankin

THIS WAS JUST A BASEBALL game, but Marie Riley has been known to get emotional at baseball games. This was just a Little league game, but that didn’t make any difference. Her son, Eddie, was pitching and Marie didn’t think the umpire was being fair to him, the way he called those balls and strikes. Her moral ire was stirred and her gentle smile, born from compassion imbued in a lifelong nurse, was nowhere to be seen that summer afternoon. One day seven years ago, the quietly devout Mrs. Riley became an unholy terror.

Invective from the grandstand is not novel to any ump, even at (or maybe especially at) a Little league game. But somewhere Marie pushed past this beleaguered fellow’s tolerance threshold. He tossed her, gave, her the thumb, kicked her out of the game as if she were some surly manager who'd just spit tobacco juice on his shoes.

"Okay, I’ll leave," demurred Mrs. Riley. “But I'll be back -- with my other 10 sons.”

With that ominous threat, she accomplished what baseball men throughout the game’s century-plus history have yet to achieve. She won an argument with an umpire. When she got home she would eat her dinner cold again, the fate of a mother who tends to her 16 children first.

But she would not leave Green Hill Park until her youngest child threw his final pitch of the game.

THE ANGER OF THE DESERT sun is in a constant state of arousal. Umpires, ballplayers and whoever happens to be lingering around the field are its victims. Eddie Riley is on the mound again, sweating, and this time pitching for pay in a Red Sox uniform. The league is quite minor, but the uniform is resplendently the same.

Bare stone mountains carve notches in the sky jutting up from the Arizona flatlands, right over Eddie’s shoulder it seems. A two-pronged cactus towers behind left field. A wooden fence that looks lifted from a ghost-town corral runs behind the ballpark's metal one.

For probably the first time since he picked up a ball Marie Riley isn’t there to watch Eddie pitch. Nor any Riley. In their multitude they’d formed a cheering section most high school football teams would envy, for Eddie‘s entire 33-1 high school career. Now he has only his teenage teammates, about half of whom speak no English.

In the first inning, against a Milwaukee Brewers’ team, he gives up a walk, a hit, throws a change-up. It’s a “circle change,” thrown by making a circle with the index finger and thumb, then jamming the ball back into the palm. He is just learning the pitch.

As soon as Eddie releases the ball he thinks, “I hope he doesn’t hit this," because he could feel the way it left his hand. He knows the ball isn’t going to drop the way a change-up should. He sees it floating toward home, right in the batter’s eyesight. Eddie grunts with disgust almost before the batter has swung and sent the ball sailing over the left-center field fence. A three-run homer.

It’s funny how you think of all those things in just a fraction of a second,” he muses later. In all of high school he allowed only one home run, and that was on the last pitch he ever threw, costing him the only game he ever lost. He has two pro losses already.

“If I had gotten down on myself, l would have been out of there after that home run in the first inning. If you get down on yourself, you’re done for," Eddie says after the Brewers take home a' 7-3 win. The other four runs off of Eddie were unearned, scoring on errors, which this callow Red Sox squad commits copiously.

“If you get bombed one day, you just got to say to yourself, “Well, I’ll try harder the next day,” Eddie philosophizes.

“He never did let things bother him much,” his mother echoes from back home.

“I’ve got to start thinking a lot more. This isn’t high school. This is the pros. I can’t go out and strike out 19 guys in a game now. I’ll tell you, I’ve learned that."

EDDIE HUNG IN THERE UNTIL the seventh inning, even though he walked six batters. He was supposed to be limited to 120 pitches. After the fifth inning he sneaked a look at the pitch chart and saw that he’d already thrown 110.

“So Riles, you want to come out?" his manager challenges.

“Hell no!”

“Then sit down and shut up.”

Eddie has been a professional baseball player since June, with his favorite team, no less. The Boston Red Sox signed left-handed pitcher Edward Riley of St. Peter-Marian High School in Worcester, Mass. after selecting him with their sixth pick in this year’s amateur draft. He was the first player the Red Sox took directly from high school. Their first five picks were college kids. The Red Sox picked 38 players in all. A hard-throwing lefty with a sharp curve ball, they have a feeling about Eddie.

He’s 18 years old and 2,700 miles from his Paine Street home. It's a triple-decker off Lincoln Street in the Hahnemann Hospital neighborhood.It's not much different than a thousand triple-deckers in Worcester, except that most of them house a different family on each deck. The Rileys live on all three floors themselves and Eddie slept three-to-a-room for years.

This blazing August he sleeps in a motel in Phoenix, with just one other person in the room and with the air conditioner chilling to truly antarctic-levels.
Urban Arizona is more asphalt than desert sand, and the ball field where Eddie pitches is an artificial oasis. There, cactus is purposely planted and the expanse of grass is probably larger than that of all the front yards in the state patched together since most front yards are gravel and dust. The field is about 15 miles from the motel in a suburb called Peoria.

“The first thing l realized when I came out here is you don‘t wear pants. You wear shorts all the time," Eddie advises as he strolls around the Comfort Inn.

The three-floor motel is at the comer of Camelback Road and Black Canyon Highway in Phoenix. Camelback is a six-lane thoroughfare lined by an endless succession of fast food joints, 7-Elevens, car dealerships and ceramic-roofed shopping centers. Black Canyon is a segment of Arizona’s only superhighway, which cuts through midtown Phoenix. He’s heading up to his cool second-floor room from the lobby. Walking around, diving in the pool, sleeping, playing cards and invading a nearby Burger King, this is how Eddie and the other players pass the long afternoons. They're off the playing field by 12:30.

"DID THEY TELL YOU SOME OF the things that went on in this motel?" Eddie asks, his quiet Worcester drawl rising a bit with mild amazement. "We had a cult of murderers living in the room right below us There were eight of ’em and the cops raided the place and arrested six and two got away. They'd killed about 200 people across the country or something. And then this guy shot himself in that room down there. Then there was this guy beating his wife, and the cops came and broke it up, but when they left he started beating her again.” He shakes his head.

“Life in the minors, huh?”

“I don’t know what it is,” mutters Eddie’s roommate, Bernie Doyle, as they lounge lazily in their motel room. An unwatched soap opera drones from the TV which is never off. "l think‘it's because" there's so many guns out here,” Eddie ponders. “They're so easy to get, you see people carryin’ ’em around ”

“The other day I was in a restaurant and some guy walked in with a gun in a holster around his waist,” says Bernie, who hails from the relatively civilized province of Indiana. “l was freaking out ”

There’s a slight dent in the door of their room, from a fight that kept Eddie and Bernie up late the previous night. They were harboring in their room one of the American players being hotly sought by a group of Dominicans. Nationalistic lines are hastily drawn among teenagers hundreds of miles from home for the first time and divided by language. It was a dispute settled without recriminations at the next mornings practice “We almost got kicked out of the hotel,” says Bernie with a slight but devilish smile.

Bernie Doyle is a lefty-hitting, well-muscled outfielder and first baseman, the Red Sox' 24th draft pick. He wears glasses only when he plays and sports the shaved-on-the-sides, spiked-on-top hairstyle in vogue with young ballplayers -- and cool in the Arizona heat. The other night he lost a few dollars playing cards and one of the other players gave him the haircut.

"That's pretty much all we do around here," he says. "That and sleep and eat."

THEY PLAY THEIR GAMES early in the morning to elude the most direct infra-reds and ultra-violets. But there's no outwitting the sun in Arizona. True, the lack of humidity makes the air feel a bit cooler than it is. So its 110 degrees and it feels like 105.

On his high school team Eddie was a big kid. "He's like me," says his dad Dick with a wink. "Real strong arms."

Here he's about average at a broad-shouldered six-foot-three 190 pounds.
He's one of the larger players on the Red Sox team though. In this brand new four-team league, the Red Sox split a squad with the Seattle Mariners. Consequently they only send about 15 players to their Arizona State League team. Most are young. Some of the Latin American players are babies at 17 years old. The league in which Eddie is making his debut is the lowest level of the low minor leagues.

The point of this rookie league is to get pro experience for youngsters, most of them playing their first professional baseball. The other team, A's Brewers and Padres, have some older players, however. For that and other reasons when Eddie took the mound for his third professional game his Red Sox team had just one win against 16 losses.

“I’m just out here to get my work in, then go to the instructional league," Eddie shrugs. The instructional league starts in mid-September, in Florida, and runs through the end of October. "That’s where all the big guys are down there from the Red Sox. You have to show them something. I mean, I don't have to show anyone anything down here.”

When Eddie signed his contract with the Red Sox, he was sitting at a table in the Paine Street triple-decker. At the table with him was Bill Enos, the Red Sox scout for Massachusetts. And with them, as if waiting for the last present to be opened Christmas morning, the rest of the Riley family. It was a moment that might have come earlier in the Riley saga. They were almost all athletes, baseball players primarily. Baseball is the Riley game. The girls played softball and still do. Christine Riley boasts a 22-1 record pitching in a local league.

Tommy Riley got an offer from the Chicago Cubs, but didn’t sign. Billy Riley played on the same St. Peter-Marian team as current Red Sox catcher Rich Gedman and played in the Cape Cod League, one of the country’s best amateur leagues. David and Walter played at Assumption College. And so on.

But around the table that evening, it was Eddie's moment.

"I think they're more excited about it than I am to tell you the truth, If U want to make it for anyone, it's for them. But there's one thing you have to realize when you get here: You have to make it for yourself first."

"WE HAD TO CUT OFF THE phones in the kids’ rooms because they were running up such big phone bills," says Mike Verdi, Eddie's manager, after finally realizing where Eddie is. He’s been knocking on the other players’ doors and Eddie isn’t in anybody’s room. He’s not down by the pool and he’s not out with “Doc,” the team’s 21-year-old trainer and Eddie’s mentor of sorts.

It's about 1:30 in the afternoon on the day before Eddie is scheduled to take the mound and the manager figures there’s only one place he can be. Downstairs at the pay phone.

“We make 'em use the pay phone because it forces the kids to realize how money they’re spending,” says Verdi. "It's different when you have to keep putting money in there. Otherwise, these kids would be on the phone all day.” Reportedly, one of the teams ran up a bill of $5,000.

"I was homesick the first two days out here, but after that it felt great," Eddie. Indeed, his mother says he "must've called 20 times a day in the first two days. But he said, 'Don't worry, Ma. I'll pay for them.' And he did."

Major league managers and skippers in the higher minors have the luxury of confining their concerns to daily line-ups, pitching changes and whether to bunt or hit-and-run. Those have always been low on Verdi's list. For much of his managerial and coaching career, stretching back a decade, he's been a baseball nanny. He teaches his players who've usually been, like this team, the youngest in the pros, not merely how to hit the cutoff man, drop the drag bunt and hook slide into third, but how to cash checks, do laundry, and why, generally
it's a good thing to pay your rent on time. Of course, there’s only so much that can be done with the $175 per_week the players receive.

A native of Long Island in his late 30s, Verdi has a habit of wearing his bright
white Red Sox uniform pants everywhere, except into the hotel pool. His face bears the leathery tan that comes from a lifetime spent on baseball fields from Arizona to Oneonta, New York.

His playing career ended in 1971 with a muscle tear in his throwing shoulder after just a season as a shortstop in the Yankees' farm system. His father, Frank Verdi, was a longtime minor league manager -- the only manager ever to win four championships in the International League.

Mike managed five years in the Orioles' system and spent a year at the helm of the San Jose bees -- immortalized by Rolling Stone magazine as baseball's halfway house. San Jose was stomping ground to sundry ex-big leaguers -- several of whom had been run from the majors by drug problems -- and five Japanese players on consignment. The bushes are in Verdi’s blood.

He has a house in Florida, but he uses it only a few months out of the year. He was there this spring, wondering what he was doing with the rest of his life, or at least the next few months, when he got a call from the Red Sox.

“They said they were starting this team out here and they were looking for a manager. They said, ‘You’ll have to go to Arizona’ I said, ‘He1l, I’ll go to Alaska, I don't care.'”

THE DAY AFTER THE RED SOX lost a pathetic, and pathetically typical 11-2 decision to the Padres in Scottsdale (a “road game,” actually closer to the motel than their home games), Verdi looked like he'd rather be in Alaska.

"I never thought Id say this, but I'm not having fun out here," he tells the players. They’ve gathered around with eyes solemnly averted, as if the raging Verdi were some kind of pagan sun god. The one bilingual member of the team translates Verdi’s laments into Spanish.

"I love this game. I’ll do anything. I’ll throw batting practice for two hours, but I don't even want to do that anymore."

For Verdi, it’s the toughest assignment, to convince anyone he’s not having fun on a baseball field. When the players have disappeared into the clubhouse, he’ll admit it was a touch of theatre. He had planned it the night before. the speech followed an intra-squad game pitched by the wildest hurler on the team. Five balls for every strike.

"It's really too bad because he's such a good kid, one of the nicest kids on the team. But he just can't pitch. And if you're a pitcher and you can't pitch, you've got a problem." Verdi knew the scrimmage would drag, the players would get bored, distracted, just like in areal game when they fall behind 5-0 after two innings. It would provide a natural lead-in to his "spontaneous" tirade.

Eddie was in left field during the scrimmage. The overcast skies that kept the temperatures in the low 100s had cleared and it was a crisp 110 in the outfield.

"Wasn't that boring, watching that kid pitch?" Eddie complains later, downing a palm-size cheeseburger at the Burger King a block from the Comfort Inn in downtown Camelback. "I lost three pounds just standing out there."

"We told him when he came out here that we were gonna get his big ass in shape,” Verdi laughs.

Nonetheless, Eddie has no doubt the team deserved Verdi’s harangue. “There’s
no other team that’s that much better than us. No one dominates." In the 11-2 . loss Eddie pitched an inning of relief. He came in with two men on base, gave up a single that scored them both, then gave up a few more hits and another run.
“I was just leaving the ball up there, too high," he says, chewing leisurely on another mini-burger. “I don’t know what happened. I felt great in the bullpen. But if you leave 'em up there I don’t care if you throw it a hundred, these hitters’ll hit it."

Verdi doesn’t often give those speeches. Not his nature. The last time he delivered one, the team won its only game.

This time - they go out and do again.

Eddie wreaked revenge on the Padres with a three-hit complete game In his next start he took a no-hitter into the seventh, gave up two hits, reached 100 pitches and came out with the lead (only to have the team give it up).

The secret isn't the fastball that Eddie used to mow down high school hitters, but the curve. A twinge in his elbow, developed in the high school playoffs, had stopped him from throwing it earlier. The curve ball has come back.

"Believe me, I've missed it so much. It got me out of a lot of jams in high school. I know it can get me out of a lot of jams here."

AS EDDIE TORE THROUGH HIS last season of schoolboy ball, throwing his 88-mile-per-hour fastball past batters like they weren’t there, not only the Red Sox had their eye on him. The Houston Astros were waiting to draft him. Scouts from nearly every big league club showed up at St. Peter’s baseball games. Meanwhile, college recruiters had their own ideas.

Eddie visited the campus of Texas A&M, and that was the farthest he’d ever set foot from Worcester until now. He finally signed a letter of intent, negated by his pro contract, to pitch at Seton Hall University where his brother, John, studied for the priesthood.

All the while his brother, Rich, the oldest Riley son -- 19 years between him and Eddie -- deflected all the calls. “He just told me to go out and play baseball," recalls Eddie. “And that’s what I did."

“If Eddie had been raised alone, I don't think he’d be where he is today,” says his brother, Paul.It's at Paul’s luncheonette, Riley’s-On-LincoIn, just around the corner from the three-floor Riley estate, that most Rileys congregate these days. A few still live on Paine Street, but not enough.

“I’m always going over to Paul’s because l get so lonesome,” says Marie. “It’s good to have quiet, but when you’re used to that much activity...you know. But the grandchildren are always around."

There are 10 Riley grandchildren, and the Rileys’ adopted son as well. It's reasonable to assume that they had no trouble being certified as qualified parents.
“When we were growing up, 67 Paine St. was the Fenway Park of Worcester. We were always hitting a ball around," says Jim Riley.

“Our mother had to be a nurse, with all the injuries we had," laughs Paul.

Broken windows were even more common than fractured bones. There isn’t as much excitement now. But there is a new Riley generation rising. Paul’s son, Michael, is the oldest grandchild.

“Eddie taught Michael everything he knows about baseball,” Paul says. “See, when Eddie was growing up he didn't really have anyone to play with, being the youngest. There’s just five years between him and Michael. Now Eddie takes Michael out and shows him how to throw, having him hit a target again and again."

“God has blessed me,” says Marie. “We wanted a large family. I wanted at least a dozen and we kind of went over our quota I guess. But I’ve loved them all."

THE HISTORY OF THE MINOR leagues is baseball's Bowery, where the most sparkling hopes lie dormant and wrecked. And in the minor leagues the future is an open invitation to a party where the night is always young. But you have to dance in there alone.

“This is my dream and if I want to fulfill it l have to do this," says Eddie Riley, waiting for another infinite afternoon to pass through the clock. “Worcester’s always going to be there. So I’m not worried."

POSTSCRIPT 2011: Ed Riley played eight seasons in the Red Sox system, making it as high as the AAA Pawtucket club. After four more seasons playing minor league ball on the independent circuit, he rejoined the Red Sox as a special coaching assistant with the Boston team, finally making it to the majors. In February of 2011 he was named manager of Worcester Tornadoes in the independent Can-Am League.

Vote of No Confidence

Everything you need to know about stealing elections

NOTE: This article was written more than 21 years ago, yet in my view it remains relevant today.

By Jonathan Vankin

Reprinted in abridged form from
"Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper," Sept. 28, 1989.
The author makes grateful acknowledgment to Dan Pulcrano.

The next president of the United States may not be chosen by the voters of the United States. Instead, he or she may be the choice of whomever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the votes. A single, Berkeley- based firm manufactures the software used in the machines that compile more than two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted votes. Analysts describe the software as "spaghetti code," tangled strands of instructions indecipherable to outsiders. The experts say the code could be manipulated without detection. In fact, that may have happened already.

Vote fraud by computer is an even greater threat to local elections, the experts fear. With the entire system shrouded in mystery and absent of assurances that the voting process is tamper-proof, voters these days have more reason than ever to ask, "Does my vote count?"

"The whole damn thing is mind-boggling," says Ronnie Dugger, a Texas-based writer who investigates computerized elections. "They could steal the presidency." "Any use of computer technology is subvertable," Peter Neumann of the Menlo Park research firm SRI confirms. "The consensus is that elections can be rigged easily locally, but nationally takes a lot more work." However, Neumann says, the task of fixing a presidential election is "doable."

Election-rigging is a time-honored tradition in the US, from the days of New York's Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall to Chicago's legendary Mayor Richard Daley, who, historians believe, engineered President Kennedy's narrow margin of victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 general election by stealing a key bloc of Illinois votes. And Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate victory, according to a biographer, was the result of vote-rigging in Southern Texas, where ballots were burned before a recount could take place.

As recently as 1988, a US Senate race in Florida, in which Republican Connie Mack defeated incumbent Buddy MacKay by just 35,000 out of four million votes, stirred deep suspicion though no fraud was ever proved. The question, however, is whether a well-executed computer vote fraud ever would yield enough evidence to constitute "proof."

Ballot boxes can be stolen and stuffed, mechanical lever machines can be tinkered with, paper ballots can be forged. But computers seem somehow more sinister. Though defended, as one would expect, by professionals in the field who insist that computers are less vulnerable to error and tampering than counting paper ballots, the invisibility of computer functions and the esoteric languages they use make that assurance difficult to accept.

"Computerized elections could be made more difficult to defraud than hand-counted elections, but they're not that way now," says Erik Nilsson, a Portland, Ore., software engineer who monitors computerized voting for the Palo Alto-based Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). "If you believe election officials deliberately defraud elections, if you really believe people are that dishonest, then we're kind of stuck."

Nilsson echoes many computer professionals who say that the internal security/measures of most vote-counting systems make tampering difficult to detect. He is cautious on the subject of widespread computer tampering. "Our feeling has been that while we know vote fraud exists, the larger problem is error," he said in an interview.

Other critics go a step further. "CPSR has been very conservative on this issue," Dugger says. The journalist is a native of South Texas, where, he says, election-rigging is a matter of course. "If they're asking me to trust politicians and election officials," he quips, "they'll have to ask Someone else."

Even if elections were never corrupted, the vulnerability of computerized vote-counting could so damage public confidence as to render elections virtually useless.

"The public's perception of the security (as well as the accuracy) of the vote tabulation process is as important as the actual security measures," said a 1988 report by the Pennsylvania research firm ECRI." And care must be taken to avoid even minor nuisances that can give the public and political leaders the impression that the system's integrity is not sound."

Unfortunately, the problem is more than simply "public perception," more than "minor nuisances." In many important ways, the system is not sound. "The complex systems that tally 55 percent of our electorate are badly designed, hard to monitor and subject to a host of technological threats," Nilsson wrote in a CPSR "Election Watch" report. "Worse yet, detection of error or sabotage is more difficult than in traditional elections." In the report, Nilsson and a co-author listed ways in which vote-counting software can be "secretly changed." The possibilities include adding extra ballots,' discarding some ballots, misreading ballots, turning off the computer's internal record-keeping system or simply changing the results.

"Any of these threats can be accomplished by a single computer expert or, in many instances, by a non-professional," Nilsson's report states.

So far, there have been no legally established cases of computerized vote fraud, or at least of fraudulent software tampering. "There's probably been some we don't know about," claims one computer company executive. If a computerized vote fraud were successful, would the public ever know? A Los Angeles Times article earlier this year raised that very point, quoting former California state prosecutor Steve White, who pointed out that "if you did it right, no one would ever know. You just change a few votes in a few precincts in a few states and no one would ever know."

The technique of fixing a relatively small number of votes could be used to swing a close election to a designated candidate. Just as troublesome is the prospect of increasing a candidate's margin of victory. Presidential elections are rarely won by margins of more than a few percentage points, and more than 8 percent is considered a crushing margin of victory. Altering a small percentage of votes in various districts across the country could turn an indecisive election into an artificial "landslide," creating a false "mandate" for the winning candidate.

But who on Earth would do such a thing? In Chicago in 1982, 58 Democratic party bosses were convicted of fraud after they were caught stuffing not the ballot box, but the computer. They had punched out fraudulent cards for falsely registered and nonexistent voters, then run them through the card-reader.

There have been numerous other ambiguous cases. Many of them have involved Berkeley's Computer Election Service (CES)-which recently changed its name to Business Records Corporation Election Service. The company is the dominant force In the American election industry; an estimated 33 to 40 percent of all American votes are cast on and counted by CES systems. CES uses aversion of the punch-card voting system prevalent in California.

In 1985, the National Security Agency (NSA)-the government's most expansive and most secretive intelligence service-took an interest in CES. According to the New York Times, NSA was following a directive from then-President Reagan to improve the security of major non-military computer systems.

Government officials were queasy at the prospect of a top-secret military spy agency-particularly NSA, whose domain is high-tech intelligence gathering-delving into the nation's electoral process. According to the Times, an official of the government's General Accounting Office told a Senate committee that NSA's involvement with CES "raises basic questions concerning the extent to which the defense establishment should be involved in policy formulation within the government's civilian agencies."

The chair of the House Science and Technology Subcommittee at that time, Rep. Ron Glicksman, also expressed "serious reservations " about NSA's involvement with CES. The Times story of Sept. 24, 1985 (which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day) , announced that NSA was "investigating" CES to determine if its systems wereto fraud, but the NSA now says the Times got the story wrong. "There never really was an investigation," says Cynthia Berecek, an NSA public information officer. Berecek said the National Security Agency's interest in CES was in "data gathering," not "investigating." The NSA, according to Berecek, no longer has responsibility for computer security outside of government operations. She says the Times misquoted an NSA spokesperson as saying, "We have no interest in any particular election." The correct quote, according to Berecek, should have been, "We have no interest in elections per se." (Berecek says the NSA spokesperson interviewed by the Times kept a written record of the conversation.) Exactly what "improvement" the NSA was supposed to have made in the CES system was never announced. Berecek says there were "no results to talk about" because there was no "investigation," only "data gathering."

"If you sit and read a magazine that has an article about a computer company, that's gathering data," Berecek says. The NSA is the government's electronic intelligence bureau, responsible for monitoring telephone calls, telex messages and other electronic communications. It also gets information from spy satellites.. According to some reports, the secrecy-obsessed agency possesses the most powerful computer system in the world. In addition to the concerns raised by NSA's "data gathering," doubts about the company's integrity have been raised in several civil lawsuits. In these civil lawsuits (no criminal charges were filed), CES has been accused of actually participating in election fraud. Despite the fact that CES has never lost a court case, the company's public image certainly hasn't been helped by the litigation. In 1983, several losing candidates in Indiana (a state where a county clerk once pronounced vote-buying as "a way of life") sued CES and local election officials, charging them with "false and fraudulent" vote counts.

CES President John Kemp denied in the press that his company participated in wrongdoing of any kind, though he did admit to the New York Times, "It is totally economically unfeasible to have a fraud-proof system." CES also has been challenged in at least three other states. When investigators have tried to unravel the CES counting program, however, they inevitably have gotten lost in the linguini-like mess. In the Indiana case, the defeated candidates brought in computer consultant Deloris Davisson to analyze the CES vote-counting software. She found it hopelessly obscure and hard to follow. Her report termed the program's source code (the key to understanding the program) "convoluted, unstructured and undocumented."

Davisson called its memory functions -- where the vote counts are actually stored within the computer -- "a shell game," and noted that the program doesn't stop running or even give a warning if "there are more votes recorded than, there are registered voters."

Davisson's report may beto accusations of bias. After all, she was a paid consultant hired by people who had a vested interest in proving CES faulty. But her finding are echoed in the ECRI report, which was funded by a grant from an independent foundation. Criticizing the software of "some vendors" (indicting CES only by implication), the report states that the vote-counting software has been modified so many times that "the resulting 'spaghetti code' may hide routines that could affect the accuracy of results in subtle ways, and it would be virtually impossible to find deliberately erroneous routines." (Emphasis added.) The source codes of CES programs, and those manufactured by companies with a smaller market share, are usually impenetrably obscure, incapable of being understood by "me voting public and even by the election officials who run the programs. "They treat it like it was something handed down on stone tablets. The codes should be in the public domain," says Robert Naegle, a federal elections consultant based in La Selva Beach, south of Santa Cruz. Naegle authored the government's new voluntary standards for computerized election tallying. But some of his best suggestions were refused. , Naegle recommended to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) that all source codes be written in "high level language," a computer language resembling English. While still hard to understand for the uninitiated, the codes would be more accessible than those written -- as most codes currently are -- in digital "assembly language."

The FEC rejected Naegle's recommendation.

A 1980 Pennsylvania study, not related to any court case, found that one CES program was so complex and jumbled that "it is possible to alter its functioning without any record." the study's author, University of Pittsburgh Professor Michael Shamos, recommended that the state refuse to certify CES. The state ignored him.

State elections boards are being "buffeted by elections systems salespeople," Shamos was quoted as saying in Datamation magazine. "Punch cards result in disenfranchisement. The CES system is riddled with scandal potential."

According to Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters George Mann, the system is subject to a "logic and accuracy test" run before the election, in which up to 45,000 pre-punched cards are fed through the computer. The computer's count is matched against the actual count. Members of news media and political office holders are invited to view the test. Mann, however, concedes that the system's accuracy could never be verified unless someone wanted to hand count personally 45,O00 computer cards. They just have to take his -- and the computer's -- word for it.

The punch-card system used by CES, called the Votomatic, has another disadvantage that has long concerned computer voting critics: the problem of the "hanging chad," The issue concerns the little perforated squares that voters punch out of computer-voting cards, known as "chad." When the paper rectangles aren't punched fully, they hang from the card, creating an ambiguous ballot. Elections workers, however, "sweep" the chad from the cards. The workers are put in the questionable position of deciding whether voters intended to vote for candidates where chad is incompletely punched. There are no laws in California governing how voter intent is to be determined in the case of ambiguous ballots. Usually, though, workers are not supposed to remove chad unless it is hanging from the card by one or two perforated corners.

Mann estimates that "less than five percent" of all punch cards come into the counting room with hanging chad. But there has been many an election decided by less than five percent of the vote. He also says that when a ballot fails to run through the card-reading machine correctly, election workers simply punch out a new ballot, attempting to duplicate the one filled out by the voter. There is a rich history of elections botched because of faulty card reading and counting. In a 1970 election in Los Angeles, a computer assigned votes to the wrong candidates and failed to read other votes at all. A Carroll County, Maryland, school board election in 1984 was thrown into confusion after a CES computer picked the wrong winner (the "true" victor was later determined by a manual recount). Somehow, the correct counting program had been replaced with a test program.

A four-way Dallas mayor's race in 1985 also featured oddities. When the second-place finisher requested a recount, vote-totals changed in 161 of the city's 250 precincts. Roy Saltman, a government consultant who wrote a 1988 report on "Accuracy, Integrity and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying," calls the count changes "perplexing" in his report. The second-place candidate's campaign manager alleged that the vote-counting computer's "instructions" were changed after the count showed her candidate leading by 400 votes. At around 8 pm on election night, her candidate was ahead when the computer went down. When it came back up, he was trailing.

And election that same year in Arizona experienced a near-miss when a mistake that would have given all Democratic votes to Republicans.

Those are just a few of the sizable list of elections that have been distorted by faulty computerized counting. in 1985, the wrong man was elected to the Moline, Ill., board of aldermen. In the 1986 general election, the computer simply skipped two percent of the ballots in Oklahoma County, Okla., effectively disenfranchising hundreds of voters.

And so on.

Since CES changed its name to Business Records Corporation there is now a new Computer Election Services. This separate company was founded by Robert Varni, a founder of the original CES in the 1960s. His company, located in a Benecia industrial park, is planning to market a "chad free" punch card system and hopes to reestablish what Varni says was the original, sterling reputation of CES -- a reputation that has been tarnished in the original company's later years.

Another founder of the "first" CES has a similar idea. Jack Gerbel's company, Unilect of Dublin, Calif., is also selling a chad-free punch manufactured by Triad of Ohio. In fact, Gerbel says he has "no knowledge" of any other chad-free punch and was surprised to hear of Varni's system.

But punch-card voting may be on the way out, replaced by more advanced technology. the trend in the computer elections business is toward "direct recording" machines -- basically, automatic teller machines for voters. These machines increase the convenience of voting and the speed with which votes can be tabulated on election night. But since there are no ballots,, there is no way to manually verify the machine's counts. Some direct recording devices are capable of transmitting counts immediately over phone lines or even via satellite.

Consultant Naegle recommended to the Federal Elections Commission that direct recording machines should have some way of recording votes independent of its own internal memory. Again, the FEC rejected what seems like a sensible, even crucial, suggestion.

One of the most widely used direct recording machines is called the "Shouptronic" named for its company, R.F. Shoup. The president of that company, Ransom Shoup II, was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia.

New York City is now prepared to spend up to $50 million to convert its elections to direct recording machines or another electronic system known as "optical mark." the Shouptronic is among the candidates in a furious campaign to win the Big Apple contract.