Former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker are in Houston this week conducting a hearing on how to improve U.S. elections. This opens an opportunity to dispel popular myths surrounding the technology of electronic voting.

Direct recording electronic (DRE) machines employ touch screens and other high-tech devices to make voting simpler, easier and more accessible. The machines are valuable, as they can tally the votes quickly and offer special features such as headphones and Braille-embedded keyboards to enable the blind and other physically challenged individuals to vote at a polling location.

In the last presidential election, 40 million Americans in more than 700 counties used DRE machines with relatively few problems. But DRE's remain a lightning rod for controversy as partisan pundits, computer scientists and wide-eyed activists consider potential problems.

Some opponents have led a misinformation campaign about e-voting, impressing Americans with far-fetched schemes of digital fraud and deceit. One of the most common is that the 2004 presidential election was stolen because there was a difference between exit polls and actual results in states that employ DRE's.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A report released by the firms that conducted the polls on behalf of the major television networks found that support for Sen. John Kerry was overstated nationally and in 26 states on Election Day, due in part to an oversampling of Kerry supporters by poll workers.

But not all concerns about DRE can be dismissed as easily. Many respected computer scientists have brought to the public's attention the possibility that hackers could break into the machines and rig election outcomes.

While it is true that no system is tamper-proof, it is also true that it takes significant expertise and plotting to hack a machine, ironically making the system more secure than traditional paper ballots.

Historically, paper ballots were overly manhandled, being placed into boxes, moved around and passed through the hands of low-level poll workers to precinct supervisors and county officials. Fraud was less detectable, and more prevalent, because prescored ballots could be easily corrupted or votes altered with a simple punch through a hole, or mark of a pen. With DRE, features such as remote vote storage and a visual verification screen of voter selections are innovating these problems out of existence. America's voting system could become even healthier if other new procedures are adopted at the same time.

E-voting opponents demand a verified paper-trail backup to make sure votes are counted properly. But paper trails are meaningless if manual counts and voter verification are still prone to fraud and human error. And verified paper trails for DRE's have proven to be expensive, potentially bankrupting cash-strapped counties and eroding the efficiency of voting management. The back-up issue is serious, but there are less-Luddite solutions, such as electronic or audio verification.

The real key to making sure that the electronic back-ups are secure will be in reviewing the code that runs the machines, a simple procedure that counties should make part of the normal election-preparing process. And all indications are that the public approves of such a move. Indeed, despite the newness of the use DRE technology, public approval for electronic voting remains strong.

According to a 2005 opinion poll developed by the Pacific Research Institute and conducted by Global Market Insite, 51 percent of Americans (voters and nonvoters alike) trust automated voting machines, with 25 percent not trusting, and 24 percent unsure. In addition, more than six in 10 respondents believed new technology would help improve the voting process, and more than half said it would help reduce electoral fraud.

Former President Carter and Secretary Baker should seize the opportunity to dispel e-voting myths. Technology promises to improve and transform American elections when deployed in a reasoned and careful way. The world's greatest democracy deserves nothing less.