Morons on the Hill

Tuesday November 2, 2004 - 3:38PM EDT

Well I voted today. Simple process, took less than 5 minutes. I live in a small town so there was no line and no waiting. As suspected though, the whole process is horribly ineffecient and fraud prone. First of all, no one asked me for ID even though it was my first time voting. All I did was give my name(could have been any name) was shown a piece of paper with my signature and had to sign the same signature right next to the signature that was already there. I then went into the booth, click, click, and thats it. There are so many things wrong with that process that I don't know where to begin. Problems that are so blatanly obvious, that it is sickening.

Lets talk about another thing. Voter registration is suppose to prevent people from voting more than once. Yet each state runs its own election for president. But you are only suppose to vote once in the the whole country right? How does each state verify that somone didn't vote in another state. I seriously doubt that every state cross-checks all their county registration lists with every other county in the whole country. That is the only way to reliably eliminate multi-voting. If they do I would be surprised. Besides people make up fake indentities all the time. What is needed is a national database that verifies the identity of everyone in the whole country. Actually it probably exists, but of course it is not being used for anything worthwhile.

What is the deal with absentee balloting. We are allowing people to mail in ballots but not send email ballots, ludicrous. Don't even get me started on why you are restricted to vote in a certain place because voter registration lists are paper based and not in a centrally accessible county or even state-wide database, ludicrous. Last time I checked the Internet was being used for just about everything else, our precious money included, I guess advancing democracy is not worthy of the Internet. No one should ever be turned away from voting regardless of where they go, simply because you don't have a list with their name on it. Does that make sense to anybody?

Let's start with Internet accessible voting registration lists so that if you show up in the wrong place you don't get the business. All the poll worker does is logon and check the database to make sure you are registered somewhere, then allow you to vote. Last time I checked you could dial a phone to anywhere in the country and I think there is a phone at just about every polling place in the country. Then they can print out whatever paper you need to sign and have you sign it. Poll places can print out registration lists the day before and just lookup the names of people who happen to show up at the wrong place. Alright enogh of this for now, time to work on websites.