The Tease of Things I Don't Need

"If it wasn't written down it never happened..."

The above was a quote from a co-worker some years back, one Mike Davis, and it's a simple bit of CYA reasoning that comes to mind every so often as so functionally useful as to be considered true -- once one waives off the tree falling in a forest philosophical trappings.

This comes to mind as I'm reminded of a push being made to protect voters from malfunctioning and/or tampered-with electronic voting machines. The Computer Ate My Vote campaign is something I meant to mention last week.

The gist of it (as you'll see if you click on the above link) is that many of the electronic voting machines being pushed as a solution to the 2000 election's dangling chads problem don't have a printed nor printable verification. People make their selection and trust that that information is properly recorded. Tests of many of the machines have not only demonstrated serious security flaws, but sometimes have more basic problems accurately holding onto to the information.

The push is to have all regulation machines have an enclosed print-out of the votes cast - something to allow each voter to see that his vote was recorded properly (via a small viewing window) and so would allow for a complete record of the vote in the event of a recount being necessary. It would function much as the audit tape in cash registers do.

Given all the problems that were brought to light in the 2000 election we need to have a solution that's a solution, and doesn't bring with it its own host of problems. Please recall how the media's attention revealed how routinely hundreds and more of votes at individual locations all across the country are effectively lost or nullified - whether by design or accident - in elections. We don't know how many thousands, tens of thousands or more votes are routinely "lost" each election cycle. Given how close the voting was four years ago, and how contentious this upcoming race is almost certain to be, we need for every voter to have a reasonable assurance that his vote will count.