By Alice Marshall, Founder, Presto Vivace, Inc.

It all started with the best of intentions. During the great storm of the recount of the 2000 presidential election, television news organizations ran stories about voting machines that worked like the banks' ATM machines. They were described as easy to use and were designed with an earpiece that could be used by blind voters. It seemed like the perfect solution.

What's more: The voting machine manufacturers had done all the things we talk about in PR to lay out the ground work for acceptance of their technology.

They had courted the National Association of State Election Directors, the League of Women Voters, the National Federation of the Blind and all the other groups interested in such matters. The only ones objecting to their technology were publishing on obscure websites—the sort of people who can be ignored most of the time. In this case, that was an error, an error that would prove very costly to the industry.

I first learned of the controversy from my website designer, who sent me the link to Bev Harris' now defunct Talion website. She had been looking into a Nebraska senate race and had received a threatening letter from ESS, Inc.'s lawyers, which she proudly displayed. It was to be the first of many cow-handed tactics the industry would employ against Harris and her allies. A threatening letter can easily be portrayed as an admission of guilt, and, as a PR professional, Harris played it for everything it was worth.

Harris has a sensationalistic approach that is self-discrediting. An understated tone, the type employed by Amnesty International country reports, works best in such situations. Harris' taste for sensation was a lucky break for the industry.

In the atmosphere of distrust created by the 2000 recount, Harris' allegations found a receptive audience. Her site began to be linked on forums such as Slashdot, Salon's Table Talk, and Democratic Underground.

The next blow to the industry came from a site called The Georgia Debacle. It described the problems with the 2002 Senate race in Georgia. Unlike Harris, this author took a narrow approach, concentrating on the technical problems with the voting machines. This site was widely linked on discussion forums.

The industry received a devastating blow when Harris found part of the Diebold's GEMS code while searching the Internet. She gave it to Avi Rubin, a computer security expert at Johns Hopkins University. He described the code as grossly insecure. Rubin's words had enormous credibility because of his reputation as a security expert and because of his understated tone, confining his criticism to the technology, without addressing the political leanings of management.

In July of 2003, Bev Harris released her book, "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century." It became a must read for activists, but never crossed over to a broader audience.

That same year, the industry was hit by a blow that might have come out comic opera. For reasons best known to himself, Walden O'Dell of Diebold wrote a fundraising letter for Bush saying that O'Dell was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." How a CEO of a company under that amount of suspicion could have signed such a letter we will never know, but it illustrates the importance of keeping management aware of online buzz and refraining from pouring gasoline on existing fires. Ohio decided against buying Diebold machines precisely because of that letter.

In the autumn of 2003, Swarthmore students began posting Diebold internal company memos that revealed that the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software. The company's response was comically self-discrediting; they issued cease-and-desist letters, citing copyright law. A more open confession of guilt would be hard to imagine. Support for the Swarthmore students grew like wildfire. Their case was taken up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ultimately, Diebold was forced to back down.

We can only guess at the level of employee morale at Diebold and at the other voting machine manufacturers. Happy employees do not leak internal memos to your most determined critics. If your internal communications strategy is "what the public doesn't know won't hurt the public," your strategy needs adjustment.

By this time, an entire constellation of forces was assembling to fight the machines. It was led by computer security experts, not your first choice in a political fight. Most of them had no previous experience with political activism, a lucky break for the industry, who had been cultivating their political contacts for years.

Throughout the 2004 election campaign, the controversy over the voting machines remained a backdrop, on the minds of activists, but not part of the campaign debate. That all exploded on election night, when the results were at significant variance with the exit polls.

The ensuing controversy over the Ohio recount was like a lightning strike on dry grass; it exploded in political fire. Markos Moulitsas, impresario of the Daily Kos website, didn't have much use for conspiracy theories concerning voting machines and banned a whole group of people from authoring and recommending such diaries. That was a lucky break for the manufacturers. Keith Olberman was not so quick to dismiss the allegations concerning voting machine irregularities and did a series of shows on the controversy. As his ratings climbed, interest in the story continued to grow.

By this time, reporters all over the world were following the story, from New Zealand, to India, to Ireland. In the world of the electronic newsstand and Google News Alerts, there is no distinction between a newspaper in Auckland and Cleveland. From the point of view of the activist blogger, they are equally accessible, and online buzz continued to swell.

HBO ran Bev Harris' documentary, "Hacking Democracy," just before the 2006 election. Millions of voters went to the polls with serious doubts as to whether their votes would be properly recorded. On its election show, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" used a graphic of maps of states going into a Diebold machine with a shredder sound effect. The machines had become reduced to joke status.

So far as I am aware, this is the first online corporate meltdown. It offers several lessons:

• First, pay attention to online critics and treat them with respect—even if they are conspiracy theorists.
• Second, online activists live for threatening letters. Such tactics will almost certainly backfire.
• Lastly, be aware of what is being said about your company and refrain from obviously inflammatory actions. For example, if you are being accused of election fraud, do not sign political fundraising letters—and certainly do not promise to "do all you can do" to deliver a state's votes for your preferred candidate.

The critics of the voting machines kept asking, how do I know the machines are recording my vote as I cast it? The industry's response has run along the lines of, "trust us." This is not an adequate response. In my judgment, the industry would be well advised to phase out the touch-screen machines in favor of optical scan, or sell off the divisions. There is no sale in the world that is worth this kind of controversy.

Alice Marshall is founder and owner of Presto Vivace, Inc., a PR firm specializing in technology companies and government contractors. She blogs here.