I Voted!

I Voted!

Originally uploaded by MikeOliveri.

So the vote’s over. The Dems have taken over the world and here in Illinois we get to endure four more years of Blagojevich. But it’s okay, I was prepared for disappointment; I voted Green. Neither gubernatorial candidate from the GOP and Dems were worth a damn.

And once again there were problems with the ballot systems around the country. They were not as widespread as during the 2004 elections, but bad enough.

Here in my rural district, we used simple paper ballots. You have your ballot and your pen, and you color in the ovals next to your selected candidates. And these are fat ovals next to large, bold-faced names, so it’s not like you’re going to get confused when selecting candidates. When you’re finished, you feed it into an optical reader. No hanging chads, no confusing butterflies, no complicated levers, and most importantly, no complex computer equipment to get screwed up or tampered with. And when all is said and done, you have a clear paper trail to fall back on. It would even be easy to reconcile the counts against the paper! The machine says it took 500 votes, you can count 500 ballots in the receptacle.

Tell me again what’s wrong with this system?

Oh, right. The big parties can’t pay a manufacturer or hacker to skew the results because it would be too easy to catch.