My boss had a funny comment on this election. "Here we are in 2004 and our voting technology consists of an IBM punch card, a thumb tack (the card puncher), a cardboard box, and two fat guys." I doubt anyone wants to think about it now, but we might as well get started if the next election is going to be any better.

Consider this story about 3893 false Ohio votes for Bush. Not enough to change the result, but remember only 5 of 88 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines in this election. Punch card sytems have problems too, but it looks like Ken Blackwell was correct to block new e-voting systems.

We have ATM cards that work anywhere in the world, why can't we get reliable voting technology? Seems like we should move to a computer based system with open source software (verified by independent experts) with a paper back up that can be re-counted. I'm not an expert, but it sounds like the scantron card systems where you fill in a circle (like the SAT tests) and then scan the card have the fewest errors and complaints.

<font color="#000002" size="1">[ November 07, 2004 06:09 PM: Message edited by: LanDroid ]</font>