In a demonstration of its Direct Recording Electronic voting machine with a paper trail, Sequoia demonstrated that its machine failed to report four votes in Spanish.*

Charles tried again to vote in Spanish with the same result: He cast votes on two mock ballot initiatives, but they were absent from the electronic summary screen and the paper trail.

"The paper trail itself seemed to work fine but what it revealed was when he demonstrated voting in Spanish, the machine itself did not record his vote," Chesin said. "Programming errors can occur and the paper trail was the way we caught it."

Charles said his company's touch-screen actually did record the electronic votes in its memory but through an oversight failed to reflect the votes on its electronic display and printout.

"There's no problem with the way the equipment worked. It was a problem in the ballot setup," Charles said. "People do make mistakes and that's why you have ballot proofing. Because it was for demonstration purposes, we didn't put all the attention into it that we should have. That would never have occurred in a regular election."

Kim Zetter reports:**