Biennial off-topic rant, MMXII

So here we are again, twelve years after the Supreme Court had to pick a president because it couldn't be determined using the best technology in use at the time whom voters in Florida had chosen, four years after I first complained here about the lack of progress on the voting technology front since then, and two years after further lamenting the same. 

You'd think things had gotten better by now, wouldn't you?  Well, think again.

I just came from my local polling place-displaced from its usual neighborhood library branch location by road construction-and hasten to report that not only do the powers that be still consider only a single electronic touch-screen voting machine per location to be adequate, but that one machine wasn't even working when I signed in.  At least that's what I overheard a poll worker telling another voter.  Now, I wasn't really trying to start anything, mind you-after all, this is only the closest presidential election since Kennedy-Nixon, and we all know no one would even think of anything like...

Well anyway, no sooner had the seeds of suspicion been planted than another poll worker announced to one and all that the e-machine had suddenly and miraculously regained its good health and was once again available to cut down on the growing line of voters waiting for an available seat to open up so they could sit down and begin filling out their paper ballots.

And while I'm going to have to admit, sadly, that the residents of this particular precinct perhaps may lean towards the old-fashioned-I'm sure many if not most of those taking paper ballots would have opted for them if they'd been asked-that's no excuse for not continuing efforts to improve the overall process-and that means modernization.  The local election board ought to engage in more education-public demonstrations of touchscreen voting with hands-on time for participants, for example-and do a better sales job on how much faster and more convenient voters can do their patriotic duty that way than they can using the older one. 

And as for my suggestion two years ago that we ought to seriously consider moving to some form of online-from-home voting, I wish I'd known it would take one of the worst hurricanes ever to hit the Northeast for someone to take the idea seriously.  I might not have bothered.