A group of Utahns concerned about the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines urged state leaders to exercise caution in replacing the current punch-card ballots.

Approximately 50 people rallied on the Utah Capitol steps Tuesday, hoping to convince the state elections office to delay the purchase of new voting machines at least a year.

With that delay, the number of voting systems available will increase, as will the information about possible problems with existing systems, said Barbara Simmons, a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

The rally was part of the national Computer Ate My Vote Day, which included similar rallies in 23 other cities and a petition calling for machines that print paper ballots that organizers claimed had more than 350,000 signatures.

The Utah rally came five days after the state's Voting Equipment Selection Committee released its request for proposal (RFP) for new voting machines, which are required to be in place by the 2006 election. The changes are federally mandated through the Help America Vote Act, which was passed by Congress in 2001 responding to the voting debacle in Florida following the 2000 election.

"If I had a single message for the people doing the RFP, it would be wait," Simons said. "There are other systems in the pipeline."

Simons was one of three computer experts who warned about the multiple problems that could occur because of electronic voting machines. One of the primary concerns was the lack of a public "open source" computer code for the machines, which would allow computer programmers to test the programs for security flaws or processing errors.

Amy Naccarato, state elections director, said that she has heard the concerns about the source code, as well as worries about the lack of a printed ballot from many of the machines. However, because the state is facing the federal deadline, they do not have the luxury of waiting.

"It's very interesting," she said about using "open source" machines, "but unfortunately, it's not to the point where it is available right now."

As for the criticism that the state is rushing the purchase of the machines, Naccarato said that she actually has been afraid they are moving too slow. Even if the machines are purchased by the end of the year, as the committee hopes, they will not be delivered until next spring, giving county clerks only a few months to train before municipal elections.

By comparison, Utah is one of the last states to still be using punch-card ballots this year, while it is estimated that as many as 50 million people will be using electronic machines in 2002, and 20 percent of the nation's voters have already cast ballots electronically in previous elections.

The amount of voters using the machines this year is actually a concern for Alan Dechert, president of the nonprofit Open Voting Consortium. As more people use the machines, more problems are being discovered with both the machines and the companies making them.

"These decisions about how we're going to correct the voting problems are coming under more scrutiny every day," he said.

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Contributing: Associated Press

E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com