CARACAS - Venezuela's electoral council is scrapping its 6-year-old voting machines and replacing them with touch-screen computers from a tiny South Florida company whose machines have never been used in an election anywhere.

The switch -- coming as President Hugo Chávez maneuvers to avoid a recall referendum -- has sparked a fury among his opponents, who say the new machines from Boca Raton-based Smartmatic Corp. could be used to manipulate the tally in a recall vote and other elections.

It could also cast an international spotlight on the reliability of electronic voting systems, hotly debated since the 2000 U.S. presidential election and Florida's ensuing hanging chad, butterfly-ballot chaos.

''We have no trust in these new machines. We are afraid they are preparing to cheat us, and we have reasons to be worried,'' said opposition congressman Edgar Zambrano.

The National Electoral Councils five-member board awarded the contract to Smartmatic and its partners on Feb. 16 amid objections by the two board members sympathetic to the opposition that they had been shut out.

''The selection process was secret and it didnt allow us to get any information about the bidders and their products,'' board member Sobella Mejías wrote in a letter to the rest of the council.

When Venezuelans first elected Chávez in 1998, they cast their votes using brand-new optical scanners that read paper ballots -- a system considered among the most secure and advanced in the world. The $112 million voting system was built by Omaha-based Election Systems & Software.

THE PARTNERS

Now Smartmatic and its partners -- the publicly owned CANTV telephone monopoly and Bizta, a private Venezuelan software firm -- have a $91 million contract to provide 20,000 new touch-screen voting machines.

Bizta will add the candidates' names to the electronic ballot. CANTVs phone lines, to transmit vote tallies, would have been part of any election system. But Smartmatic is the central player, taking a $60 million chunk of the contract to arrange to build and program the machines.

Smartmatic's CEO, Antonio Mugica, a Venezuelan citizen, met with The Herald recently in Caracas to demonstrate the new system and address concerns that Smartmatic has never before built a voting machine.

Mugica said some employees of his company and its partners are election industry veterans, like Robert Cook, a former executive with Unisys, a large U.S.-based information technology firm. Mugica said his firm has 70 employees in Venezuela and seven in its offices in Boca Raton and Sunnyvale, Calif.

Smartmatic incorporated in Florida in 2000. State records show the companys five directors, including Mugica and his father, all listed the same home address in Boca Raton.

Mugica, offering references for his firm, said Smartmatic has partnered in the past with Unisys and with Mexicos Santander-Serfin Bank, providing security technology.

``We do have two small projects that we are doing with them, said Jacqueline Lewis, a spokeswoman for Unisys, reached in Pennsylvania. ``We have [nothing] . . . to do with the contract with Venezuela.''

Mugica said the Smartmatic touch-screen machines would eliminate errors that can occur when voters fill in the optically scanned paper ballots, and would save Venezuela money in the long run because it does not use expensive optical scanner paper.

`SECURE SYSTEM'

''Even though our system is not well known, it is the most secure voting system available in the world,'' Mugica said. ``You always have to have a first election.''

Mugica said the machines and the process by which they were chosen can stand up to international scrutiny.

Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Aviel Rubin, who studies voting systems, says the Smartmatic feature of printing a paper receipt is an important element in a secure voting technology.

But he added that having a printer does not guarantee a fraud-proof election and questioned the wisdom of switching systems on the eve of a potentially critical recall vote.

''Ive never heard of Smartmatic. Id be very concerned about an unknown player with that big of a contract, especially in a place like Venezuela, where fraud is such a big concern,'' said Rubin, reached in Washington, D.C.

``Somebody writes the software in the machines, and then you dont know what the software is doing. It can pretend to be working all day and then send out the wrong results at the end of the day.''

The first Smartmatic vote may be a trial by fire for a company that in a recent U.S. business reference directory estimated its total annual sales at less than $2.5 million.

Chávezs opponents are trying to force a recall referendum with a petition drive, but the electoral council has challenged more than a million signatures. The council and opposition are now negotiating for a way to validate those signatures.

With a possible recall vote and regional elections slated for August and September, respectively, some Venezuelans are wondering whether Smartmatic will even make the deadline.

DELIVERY SCHEDULE

Fewer than 10 of the machines have so far arrived in Venezuela for demonstrations, and the first shipment of 1,000 is expected to arrive from a factory in Italy shortly, officials said. Most of the machines are scheduled for delivery by July.

The timing is important. Under the constitution, if the recall vote is held before Aug. 19 and Chávez loses, a new presidential election must he held. But after that date his appointed vice president would complete the remainder of his term, which ends in 2006.

National Electoral Council officials said they do not expect the new machines to cause delays.

Herald researcher Elisabeth Donovan contributed to this report.