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High-tech voting improvements seem to be missing the mark

My son was telling me recently that he heard of one of the primary elections recently had polling places being run by some people who were totally stumped by all the so-called high-tech improvements. He said something about one polling place where the untrained officials were handing out pointer styluses for the touch screens and telling voters they were regular pens. When the pens failed to put out any ink -- said election officials assured the voters it must've been some sort of high-tech ink that the machines would be able to read.

How ironic. We live in a country that takes the voting process seriously enough to spend billions on voter reform and high-tech, "fail safe" procedures to assure votes get tallied correctly -- but the whole system fails because it is managed by a system of mostly aging, untrained volunteers at the polling places.

Ah, well, what do I know? I'm just a guy who reads the papers and has only missed voting in one local election in the last 25+ years.
[tags]high-tech voting machines, polling problems, untrained polling personnel, just a guy who reads the papers[/tags]

March 2, 2008 | Filed Under Odd News, Political News

Comments

2 Responses to “High-tech voting improvements seem to be missing the mark”

Albert Ross on March 9th, 2008 8:05 pm

But you have to remember that the US electoral system is flawed in so many ways. Even in the late 20thC and now in the 21st the USA has shown that the system is at the very least open to the suspicion that it is corrupt and open to manipulation.

It makes no sense that in national elections each state should be able to make its own rules as to the conduct of the election so that you even have different franchises in the various states. Which is ridiculous in what is supposed to a democracy.

The US should also consider implementing instant run-off which would open up elections to a wider range of candidates.

And then there is the issue of the cost of campaigns which effectively precludes all but the wealthy from running for major political office.
Gary on March 9th, 2008 8:39 pm

Can’t argue with the points you’re making there.

I guess I’d like to see a bit more of a common sense approach: Do what you can with technology, but don’t overlook the obvious need to train poll workers.

But, yeah, our whole voting process in this country needs major retooling for sure.