Buried in a recent New York Times article, “New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Chaos,” lies a helpful reminder from Charles Stewart, identified as the head of the political science department at MIT. According to an analysis he published this year, new voting technology helped reduce the number of mismarked ballots by roughly 1 million between 2000 and 2004. “If you think things are bad and worrisome now, they were much worse before 2000,” he says. The difference is that, post-Florida, people are paying more attention to the issue.
Election officials are scrambling to hire people with tech experience to head off potential problems. The question, then, is whether the alarmism helps to avert a crisis. If people weren’t worried about ballot problems, ballot problems could be epidemic. But since they are worried (and doing something about it) there might not be any, so there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe.
Reader Comments:
If there is a way to rig an election, someone will find it. Upgrading voting machines is great, and one less worry, but as long as there is such a disparity in the amount one canidate has to spend over another, we can’t really call any election strictly fair. We’ll have to settle for as fair as it gets.
well as you know, Bart, Chesterfield registar Lawrence Haake has been terribly concerned about potential voting irregularities. One way or another, he is going to see that no durn dimmocrat carries the regularly Republican county.
He’s even invited the feds to watch. What a guy.
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