The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay the recall election is a good sign that we have learned the big lesson of the Florida recount debacle of 2000: Election messes can't be easily cleaned up after they happen; they need to be prevented.

The mess the federal appeals court has prevented Oct. 7 is a first cousin to the one that happened in Florida. It involves the proposed use of those notorious punch-card voting machines that haunted the Florida presidential voting.

California had decertified the machines and agreed, in a consent decree in a federal lawsuit, to replace them before the March 2004 primary.

Then along came the recall. Sacramento and five other counties, home to 44 percent of the state's voters, have been planning to use the old punch-card machines Oct. 7 because more technologically sound voting methods aren't yet in place. The rest of the state will use more modern voting technology.

But as the appeals court ruled yesterday, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 2000 Florida case, Bush v. Gore, that violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

"It is virtually undisputed that pre-scored punch-card voting systems are significantly more prone to errors that result in a voter's ballot not being counted than the other voting systems used in California," the court said.

Evidence presented in the case, which the state did not challenge, shows that more than 40,000 voters in punch-card counties could have their ballots invalidated, a far higher rate than in the rest of the state.

"The vast weight of the evidence shows that voters in counties using pre-scored punch-card balloting will have a statistically more probable chance that their vote will not be counted than voters in other counties. It is in this intrinsically unequal treatment that the constitutional problem lies," the court said.

This unequal treatment cannot easily be cured after the election. If the recall were to pass narrowly, as the polls now suggest, in an election where tens of thousands of votes in heavily Democratic Los Angeles were ruined by punch-card errors, the legitimacy of the outcome would be greatly in doubt. That is not something California needs.

As the court rightly said, "Avoiding an election that promises to dilute the votes of any particular community -- let alone communities with a disproportionately high concentration of minority voters -- firmly promotes the public interest in a fair election."

Many Californians want to put the recall quickly behind them, for one reason or another. But assuring a fair election is more important than speed. Although Gov. Gray Davis had sought to push the election to March, it's unclear what the partisan effect of delay might be; as Republican analyst Tony Quinn argues today on Page B7, putting off the election may work against Davis and in favor of Republican challenger Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But it is clear that delay will promote the integrity of the election. It will spare the state the cost of a special election, and it will avoid the possibility of election-day chaos, with long lines of confused voters trying to work their way through the long ballot.

If there was any prospect worse than the turmoil of recall, it was having that turmoil turn into another Florida debacle. The appeals court decision has saved California from that fate.