Proud to be

Tuesday November 28, 2006 - 10:24PM EDT

Generally I am not a big proponent of overt national pride or overt pride of any kind. But today I read a shocking article that makes me proud to be part Venezuelan. Alright so any pride of being Venezuelan here is secondary and laughably unimportant in relation to what I am about to tell you but I just thought I would mention it. Here is the article snippet.

Unlike with most U.S. electronic voting machines, Venezuelans will get paper receipts that verify their choices were properly recorded, and must deposit them into boxes before leaving the polls. After Sunday's vote, election officials monitored by representatives of each candidate will count millions of the paper receipts for comparison to the electronic totals. - full article

Holy crap is all I have to say. Of all the crappy things that go on in Venezuela it looks as if they finally got voting right. Not that it is a big deal but their systems looks like it kicks the crap out of anything in the United States. The best part about it is that they were able to implement this in only 2 years. What the fuck did the US do in the 4 years they had, a whole lot of nothing. They even have network connections for the machines and are disconnecting the connections during voting.  Then digital thumbprints to simply check that you didn't vote multiple times, that is so simple and brillant. This is certainly the best system I've seen yet. This story makes me ashamed to be apart of this crap we call a voting system in the United States. If establishing a voting system in Venezuela is the first step towards turning that country around then maybe Chavez's rule will not have been all bad, just mostly bad.