Posted by
darrel on Friday, October 31, 2008 2:48:47 PM
Recent stories about vote switching by electronic voting machines, voter registration fraud by the likes of ACORN, and other horror stories have me wondering why we don’t go back to the good old days of paper ballots and hand counting of same. I know we have many more voters today than when the system was first put in place, but so what?
I have heard people complain about having to wait in long lines to vote, even here in Oregon where we have mail in voting. Last minute voters wait in line at post offices or at ballot drop off locations instead of voting a day or so earlier. I can’t think of anything that can happen in the last several days before an election that would change a rational voter’s mind.
To eliminate long lines, more polling places could be used and the counting of the paper ballots could and should be witnessed by all who wanted to take part. If a small precinct, say a neighborhood precinct, knew that their count was being witnessed by those who voted, chances are pretty good that the vote would be accurate.
When I first voted at age 21, which was the legal age at the time, the precinct was next door to my house in a neighbor’s garage. There were about four voting booths set up with lever pull voting machines, which were the state of the art in those days (Jack Kennedy’s election). The levers were clearly marked and once you finished voting and opened the curtain to the booth by the use of a lever, your voting levers were returned to the starting position for the next voter. The results were positive and were tabulated by hand at the end of the day and held for collection by the main precinct, or hand delivered to that precinct.
This was in San Francisco, a major metropolitan area, and we never had to wait in long lines.
Why aren’t we doing that today instead of making fewer voting places for the electorate and forcing long lines that, according to Democrats, disenfranchise minority voters? I would think that all voters are “disenfranchised” if they have to wait in long lines which discourage them from voting.