THE controversy surrounding this week's crucial midterm elections in the United States is likely to continue long after all the results have finally been declared.

As I write, Democratic hopes of seizing control of the Senate appeared to rest on a likely recount in the swing state of Virgina.

But the army of lawyers gathering to mount inevitable legal challenges apparently had a different target - the use of electronic voting.

In Florida, there were complaints that touchscreen computers had wrongly recorded choices, while in Colorado voters queued for hours because of technical glitches. To cap it all, a squirrel was blamed for voting machines crashing in several Oklahoma polling stations after chewing through through an electric cable.

Before election day, it was reported that 80 per cent of votes would be cast on computers adapted to run specialised software for recording preferences. Even then, confidence had been rocked by a university's investigation which succeeded in altering votes after hacking into a computer in one minute flat.

Still fresh in the memory is the way one Florida county using e-voting in the 2000 presidental elections recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate.

Meanwhile, plans to use the machines in the Netherlands later this month were abandoned after it was proved votes could be stolen by a key easily purchased on the internet.

But those are problems across the Atlantic and across the North Sea. It couldn't happen in this country - could it?

Well, next month the department for constitutional affairs (DCA) will announce which local authorities have been picked to pilot e-voting in next year's local elections. Four methods will be tried out: voting over the internet, e-voting from popular locations such as shopping centres, early voting and electronic counting of votes.

A version of early voting was tried out in South Tyneside, Sunderland, Gateshead and Newcastle last May, after the authorities volunteered to take part. On that occasion, an electronic checking system was used to prevent a person voting in late April in one location, only to turn up at the polling booth on May 4 as well.

Bridget Prentice, the 'democracy minister', has insisted the trials will boost turnout and help the Government learn how to make voting easier and cheaper. But the Tories are furious, insisting the Electoral Commission found e-voting failed to deliver a significant increase in turnout, while costing £19m for the last big trials in 2003.

The Conservatives claim e-voting is even less secure than postal voting because voters are sent a Personal Identification Number (PIN) through the post.

Newspaper investigations have revealed how easily PIN numbers can fall into the wrong hands because of inaccuracies in the electoral roll.

One of the problems Stateside is that e-voting does not produce a paper trail, making it impossible to investigate any allegations of vote-tampering or error.

At the very least, the Government must insist on old-fashioned paper records here.