Serious observers are asking whether Americans can trust their election results. Voters are asking too, and it is chilling to contemplate that close electoral contests could become bruising court battles this autumn. There is good reason for concern. People do not trust electronic voting machines.

Lawsuits over voting results rose from 96 after the 2000 elections to more than 350 after the 2004 contests. How many there will be after U.S. elections in November is anybody’s guess, but analysts have invented new terminology; “the margin of victory to avoid litigation.” In state after state, vote tallies could be challenged as they were in Taiwan’s 2004 presidential election. Across the U.S., even those election commissioners who don’t care who wins pray for landslide margins so the results won’t be challenged. To add another element of doubt in the fairness of American elections, many of the people charged with running them are very partisan politicians.

Suspicion about accuracy and fairness in U.S. elections has been rampant in the new century. In 2000, the Florida voting for president was marred by numerous irregularities; confusing ballots, hanging chads, inaccurate voter registration rolls, alleged intimidation of black voters and more. The outcome in that one state determined whether Al Gore or George Bush would become president. Some say the presidency ultimately was determined by a single vote, in the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that halted litigation over recounts. That is not the way we should be choosing presidents of the United States.

The 2004 election was not as traumatic as in 2000, but it could have been. The presidential race was decided again by the outcome in a single state; this time it was Ohio. Again there were numerous irregularities. In some black areas around the major cities, there were so few operating voting machines that voters waited all day and still could not vote. Other polling stations closed early. Machines malfunctioned. Among the discrepancies in other states, a precinct in the Philadelphia area reported many more votes cast than voters recorded in the census. Elsewhere, memory cards containing 15 percent of the vote were not uploaded in a local election, and discovery of the discrepancy was a matter of luck. As for the crucial contest in Ohio, Senator Kerry, who lost to President Bush, was urged by advisers to challenge the results in court. He declined to do so, no doubt in part because the margin of victory, somewhat more than 100,000 votes, was greater than the discrepancies which could have been proven.

In both the 2000 and 2004 elections the focus was on a single state whose voting results determined who would be president. This year could be much more complicated. After the 2000 elections, states rushed to buy electronic voting machines and the companies producing them put out some very shoddy products. The machines were easily hacked, and detection was difficult or impossible. There was no paper trail which could be verified in a recount. Malfunctions were more frequent than anybody should want to contemplate. In several close elections for the House of Representatives, machines determined the winner and it was impossible to determine whether they recorded the vote accurately. These were not issues that anybody wanted to face.

Accuracy and fairness problems are not limited to the states that determined who would be president in 2000 and 2004. Many states are expected to be in close presidential and congressional races this year. That offers plenty of possibilities for results that do not reflect the votes actually cast.

It is time that we got over denial of the problems. Elections are worth stealing and people will try. Scientific studies of voting machines across the U.S. point out that in fourteen states it is impossible to verify the results of all or most of the electronic voting machines. Independent investigators estimate that at least 138 of the 270 electoral college delegates needed to win the presidency will be determined in states whose machines are glitch prone, security lax, or simply unreliable.

Efforts are being made to improve both accuracy and fairness, but the task is monumental, because elections are run at the state and local level in the U.S. America claims to be the beacon of Democracy, but if we cannot run elections fairly and have voting procedures which produce accurate results that we can trust, we will descend from the light of our ideals into the heart of darkness.

Election tallies will never be perfect, but our voting officials must do better, and they must do better now.

Goldsmith is a former director of the American Institute in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Office, and author of “Jade Phoenix,” a prize-winning novel of 1970s Taiwan that is offered in a Far East edition by Bookman Books Ltd. in Taipei.