With the eyes of the nation expected to be focused on Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race in November, one Philadelphian wants to help make sure results recorded by voting booths statewide won't be a mirage.

Stephanie Frank Singer, a former mathematics professor at Haverford College and current volunteer for a long-shot candidate in the Democratic Senate primary, is developing a computer system she hopes will be able to analyze voting data from the state's 67 counties to help determine whether any returns have been manipulated.

Election officials and voting machine manufacturers maintain that machines are safe and have proven track records. However, Singer, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from New York University, was inspired by news reports of electronic voting booth malfunctions and of exit polls that diverged from actual outcomes in some battleground states, such as Ohio, in the 2004 presidential race.

"How much evidence do you need before you are willing to entertain some doubts about how effective the checks and balances in place are?" she asks.

Singer, 41, says she hopes to have her computer system up and running in time for the November general election, which is expected to pit Republican incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum against State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. She doesn't think volunteering for the campaign of Chuck Pennacchio, a professor at The University of the Arts who is running for the Democratic nomination, is a conflict of interest; she intends to perform her analysis regardless of who wins.

Singer's operation, known as Campaign Scientific, is currently bare bones, operating out of her two-bedroom apartment near Rittenhouse Square. Funded by a $15,000 loan from her family and $12,000 raised from parties she declined to name, Singer and two former students are designing a computer program to comb through voting data for abnormal patterns. They are also selling their services as consultants on data use for progressive political candidates and campaigns.

The stakes are high in the next election since Santorum is the number three Republican in the U.S. Senate, and has been an avid supporter of some of President Bush's most controversial policies.

"In a surrogate fashion, [Democrats] are going after President Bush," says G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.

The election will also feature a markedly higher number of votes recorded by new electronic voting machines nationwide, the result of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. That law was passed to prevent the problems caused by some less-reliable voting machines, such as the punch-card systems that forced recounts in some Florida counties in the 2000 presidential election.

Critics of the electronic machines contend that vote totals may be subject to manipulation because there is no paper receipt voters can check to make sure their votes were correctly recorded and that election officials could later use for audits. Bills have been introduced in both houses of the state legislature to address the issue, but it is unclear whether they will be passed or, if they are, if it will be soon enough to have an impact on the 2006 election.

"Virtually every person who is an expert in computer security says if you are going to have electronic voting machines, you must have paper backup because things can go wrong," says Barry Kauffman, executive director of the Pennsylvania branch of Common Cause, a nonpartisan citizens' advocacy group.

Philadelphia's election officials say it's not possible to tamper with election results because recording devices are supervised by poll workers and police. But past efforts at fixing city elections have been decidedly low-tech, including methods such as the improper use of absentee ballots in a special election to fill a state Senate seat in 1993.

Machine manufacturers contend that electronic systems cannot be hacked because they operate within computer networks, and altering the software would require pass codes known only to election officials. They also say changes to the software would be recorded.

"Touch screens have been used for 10, 15, 20 years, and they've never had a valid security issue with them," says David Bear, a spokesperson with Diebold Election Systems, one of the nation's leading manufacturers of the electronic machines.

Still, earlier this month, officials in Leon County, Fla., abandoned Diebold's machines after a test showed they could be hacked without a trace, according to local news accounts. Bear counters that the tests relied on access to machines that was not possible under properly supervised elections. Diebold's machines are currently under consideration by Pennsylvania officials.

Although Singer stops short of claiming there was vote tampering in the 2004 election, she says the discrepancy between exit polls and actual returns got her attention. One analysis of exit-poll data by a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania showed that only Bush's actual vote counts were significantly higher than predicted in most battleground states, an improbable event.

"The statistical evidence" from the 2004 election, says Singer, "makes it clear that we have to be hypervigilant."

Singer says her analysis will use statistics like voting totals for each candidate, the total number of people who entered voting machines, the total number of people who signed voting registers at polls and the number of people who are registered with political parties in more than 9,000 precincts in the state. She says she's relying on the computer program to find abnormal voting patterns.

Current polls indicate that tampering may have to be done on a massive scale to make a difference in the state's Senate race. Santorum's stances on issues such as abortion, Social Security reform and Terri Schiavo, as well as controversial comments on child abuse by Catholic priests in Boston, have gotten him into hot water with some Pennsylvanians.

Casey has led Santorum by double digits since April in polls of Pennsylvania voters conducted by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. His lead was as wide as 18 points in October, but stood at 12 points on Dec. 13. Most observers expect that gap to narrow even further, considering that Santorum is expected to spend $35 million to sway voters his way.

Regardless of whether she's able to detect fraud if it occurs, Singer's work has already had one benefit. Her data collection efforts led the city to slash the cost of issuing a copy of its list of registered voters from $1,030 to just $67. That information can be a key part of campaign efforts to target likely voters in the run-up to a race.

Although a state law passed in 2002 mandated that public records, including Philadelphia's list of about 984,000 registered voters, be made available to the public for copying costs, the city, as well as some nearby counties, were still charging exorbitant fees. When Singer informed officials in Philadelphia and Pike County of the law, both recalculated their fees. "It was in the interest of the people in power to hoard information," she says. "Charging a lot of money for voter files was one way to do that."