While the media are focused on the ups and downs of the seemingly unending Republican Primary race, there is an important issue, fundamental to the functioning of the election process, that needs to be addressed well before any ballots are cast in November: the misguided, continued use of direct-record, touch-screen, vote-counting machines (DREs) in many states, including Missouri.

With or without the so-called "voter-verifiable paper tape" that Missouri and some other states require DREs to provide, there is no reliable way for election officials to do a recount when using these machines. In theory the paper tape offers a means to do this. The theory — naive at best — is that every single voter takes the time to verify that the tape is recording votes correctly, and, that the tape runs smoothly on Election Day without any mechanical difficulties that would compromise its ability to be used as an accurate record. Election officials, so the theory goes, can then compare the tape to the internally collected data with confidence.

It's a nice vision. But the reality is a different story. While the tape, when functioning properly, may be "voter verifiable," studies have shown that most voters do not take the time to review it. Moreover, severe DRE paper tape-printer problems have been reported from around the nation ever since the widespread purchase of DREs (accomplished with the help of federal funds) back in 2005 — often making verification of the tape impossible for the few voters who do bother to look at it. Such problems as printers not printing, losing connection with the DRE, the tape tearing, or not advancing, or getting severely jammed in the machine, are all regular occurrences that election officials have come to expect.

In the swing state of Missouri, where the need for a recount in November is a strong possibility, there has been a sharp increase in DRE malfunctions. In the November 2010 election in St. Louis County, where DREs are used the most heavily in the state, the Election Board's "Tech Maintenance and Phone Logs" contain two and a half times the number of DRE problems reported in November 2008 (an election with a comparable voter turnout). In November 2010, at least 25 percent of the County's DREs had a problem that required the assistance of a technician. Reports of DRE 'screen calibration problems" that caused the voter's selections to be misrepresented on the screen were alarmingly abundant (such as, "When pressing screen, getting choice above"). However, the majority of the county's November 2010 troubles involved paper tape jams — some of them unnoticed for hours by the voters, and many of them so bad that even the technicians could not remove them. One technician reports finally having to "blow out remnants of the paper" tape with "canned air." Whether or not those were voter-verified remnants is obviously a moot question.

With the voter-verifiable paper tape being so unreliable, what can a "recount" mean, then, when votes are collected on DREs? In the absence of a way for election officials to determine that the DRE software has recorded every voter's intentions accurately, they have to conduct the "recount" with the belief that it has! Taking this great leap of faith, they rerun the presumed-to-be-correct data to see if the totals come out the same as the first time.

This travesty of a recount, which we would think unacceptable in a developing democracy, must be business-as-usual in jurisdictions where DREs are used in our state.

Missouri voters should also bear in mind that DREs from every manufacturer have proven to be easily hacked, and that they all run on proprietary software that election officials cannot review, by law. All of this should put the ongoing, entertaining barrage of primary "coverage" into perspective. What does it matter who's winning this week in the polls? When all is said and done, we've got to be able to know that the results are correct in November. The important news to pay attention to right now, is that with DREs, we can't.

Republican Party officials decided to use only hand-marked paper ballots in the Iowa caucuses last month, reportedly because they wanted to avoid computer problems. Due to this decision, they had actual ballots to recount by hand when it became clear that a recount was needed. With those ballots, they were able to finally determine the real winner. We should take that as a lesson here in Missouri.

Cynthia Richards is president of Missourians for Honest Elections.