Recounts are all the rage these days. There’s the disputed and still ongoing race for the governorship of the state of Washington, an effort to recount presidential ballots in Ohio, and controversy over write-in votes for the mayor of San Diego.

Democracy is front page news beyond the borders of the United States as well. The Ukraine supreme court recently called for a do-over of their presidential election, and the deadline for a vote in Iraq is approaching quickly.

With the democractic process being such a hot topic lately, it makes me wonder how much we can even trust the results of any given election. In the Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people protested in Kiev because the election was rigged. How do we know that this doesn’t happen elsewhere?

Here’s the problem: when you submit your vote, you have no way of knowing whether it has actually been counted. What is there to stop somebody who is dishonest from miscounting or not counting your vote? The potential for fraud is only increased when it comes to electronic voting. Who is going to be able to stop the creators of voting software from programming in a “glitch” that miscounts votes?

In the recent U.S. election, there have been scattered reports of these very problems. Here are four things we do know: 1) there was a computer “glitch” in Ohio that gave more votes to Bush in a particular precinct than there were residents in that precinct; 2) the man who runs the company that supplied Ohio’s voting machines is a staunch Republican supporter; 3) there is evidence that points towards an intent by the GOP to use illegal and dishonest techniques to win elections (this week a Republican campaign manager was indicted for hiring a company to jam democratic party “get-out-the-vote” phone lines in a 2002 mid-term election); 4) the exit polls, which are usually very good indicators of the final vote count, were not only off by quite a margin, but off in a statistically unlikely number of state (more about this).

Based only on these four points–and there are many other similar examples–we have reason to be skeptical of election results. More generally, there seem to be few effective mechanisms, and little public will to prevent voter fraud. Until either is present, opportunistic and unscrupolous political players are relatively unconstrained as they take advantage of the trust, patriotism and apathy of the electorate. As the old saying goes, “In a democracy, citizens get the government they deserve.” Unfortunately we cannot be sure that citizens get the government they voted for.