Last time, the presidential election plunged into an agony of uncertainty over who had won. Part of the problem was chads, those bits of paper left on partly punched punch cards, making it hard to figure a voter’s intent. And some armed forces troops overseas lost their votes through mail delays.

This time, the companies that make voting machines are coming up with various paperless devices relying on computers and the Internet. Foulups thus far, plus possibilities of interference by Internet hackers, suggest that the cure may be worse than the disease. An Indiana county using the new machines had fewer than 19,000 registered voters, but initial results showed more than 144,000 votes cast.

Maine is on the way to avoiding any such technological nightmare. LD 1759, sponsored by Rep. Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven, would require a paper backup to be generated for every vote cast on computerized “touch screen” machines like the automatic teller machines at most banks. The bill goes before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Legal and Veterans’ Affairs in a work session and likely vote starting at 1 p.m. today.

The bill has received bipartisan legislative and public support. But at a public hearing two weeks ago, Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn raised some technical questions and termed the bill “premature.” Rep. Pingree has since conferred with Secretary of State Dan Gwadowsky and is prepared to present compromise language.

Although Maine has no touch-screen machines in use yet, those and other paperless machines are on the way. The federal Help America Vote Act will provide Maine with about $20 million to place one direct-recording electronic voting machine in every municipality by 2006 to assist handicapped voters. Critics suspect that will be a foot in the door.

The bill would place no restrictions on the optical scanners already used by about 65 percent of all Maine voters. Those machines record votes electronically from the paper ballots marked by the voters. The paper ballots are available in cases of close or contested elections.

Advocates of the bill don’t object to using the Internet to transmit vote totals to Augusta as long as the paper ballots continue to be manually delivered to the capitol and counted for the final tally. They would do well to consider a sunset provision of this process, to see whether the technology has improved adequately in, say, six or eight years

Pending legislation in Congress also deals with the national threat of total reliance on paperless machines. But Congress has yet to deal with the Pentagon’s rush into a plan for Internet voting by the armed forces overseas, a system that would be vulnerable to hackers and computer viruses.

Safeguarding the integrity of the vote can cost some money. But protecting this mainstay of our democratic system is worth it, especially when the nation is spending billions in an effort to bring democracy to Iraq.