The House Science Committee sounds like the geeky part of the House of Representatives, the kind of committee where representatives look through microscopes while all the cool congressmen are off naming bridges after themselves or going on golf vacations with lobbyists. But a hearing last month produced a number that could make even the most sociable members put down their fundraiser cocktails and pay attention.

With the mood of people doing what has to be done but nobody wants to do, the Science Committee, together with the House Administration Committee, listened to people testifying on the reliability of voting machines – the first and only hearing on the subject by this Congress. True to the spreadsheet wonkiness of the topic, the hearing seems to have produced only a single newspaper story.

But what they heard got the listeners’ attention.

“It would take somebody relatively unsophisticated to hack into a machine,” reports Rep. Darlene Hooley, D-Ore., who a month later still marvels about what she heard. “But the biggest problem isn’t hacking, but programming errors.

“In some cases, the margin of error is 9 percent.”

At that point, a roomful of politicians – most of whom at some point won or lost an election by less than 9 percent – apparently noticed.

Two hundred thirty years after the Declaration of Independence, three months before one of the most high-interest, high-stakes congressional elections in memory, voting is a high value for Americans, a practice we try urgently to spread around the world.

Counting votes is still a little wobbly.

Last week, a report from Cuyahoga County in Ohio, home of Cleveland and the state’s biggest county, said that the county’s system had such major problems it couldn’t be fixed by this November, or probably even by the 2008 election. “The election system in its entirety exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences,” wrote Steven Hertzberg, director of the study by the San Francisco-based Election Science Institute, “especially in the case of a close election.”

You might remember that last time, Ohio had kind of a close election. This year, Ohio is choosing a governor and a senator along with 18 House members.

As the House members heard, Ohio is not alone.

“Today, the state of electronic voting security is not good,” testified David Wagner, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley. With paperless voting machines, “a single person with insider access and some technical knowledge could switch votes, perhaps undetected, and potentially swing an election. … With this technology, we cannot be certain that our elections have not been corrupted.”

As states switch to high-tech voting machines, often without paper trail backups, at least nine of them face lawsuits charging their system is unreliable. It’s not as if the feds are riding to the rescue.

Hooley and her House colleagues heard that the National Institute for Standards and Technology, charged with developing standards for voting machines, is nowhere near having any. The Elections Assistance Commission, set up by the Help America Vote Act, says it will have some by next year, but there’s nothing around for this year’s elections.

The voting machine manufacturers, like everybody in the technology business, insist that the problems are all with the users. John Groh, chairman of the Election Technology Council of the Information Technology Association of America, told the hearing that the problems largely “involve humans and their interactions with technology.”

Of course, it might not make you feel much better if getting an election result wrong is accidental.

A bill by Rush Holt, D-N.J., to require paper trails for any voting system has collected more than 200 signatures in the House, but the leadership won’t allow a vote. Hooley says she’s always considered this a partisan division – until she saw the alarm of her Republican committee colleagues at the details about our current hit-or-miss voting technology.

“What’s really scary,” she says, “is that it’s important to our system that people think their vote counts, and is counted accurately.”

There’s something unsettling about living in a democracy with a margin of error of 9 percent.