Voting snafu highlights looming disaster

These problems will continue to foul vote tallies, and spoil our democracy for generations to come until something is done to nationalize our voting system. The mechanisms of voting needs to be removed from the corrupt, incompetent and lazy local officials that are allowed to choose any voting system they feel will work, or where a vendor is willing to take them out to a ballgame or cruise. These local election officials are too willing to cheat as their loyalties lie not with democracy and the preservation of our way of life; but instead with the political party which they happen to belong. An independent class of federal workers should be entrusted with running elections on a national scale, these folks should be culled from a consortium of our nation's most talented system engineers and integrators and should hold democracy as a cherished value. To many local election officials are involved in the political parties present in those localities and in all frankness can't be trusted to fairly carry out their duties.

It is absolutely a national disgrace that we don't have accurate election tallies in our country, that a recount should ever be necessary is lubricious.

'It's Not the People Who Vote that Count; It's the People Who Count the Votes' Joseph Stalin said that, and nothing could be truer. We need to remove the vote counters to be replaced with an infallible automatic electronic system, each vote should be tabulated instantly across the nation and added into the tally in presidential elections as soon as that vote has been placed. That way each citizen can watch the voting being counted in real time, so there's never any need for a recount.

Electronic voting can work, it just needs the right people managing and directing the project for it to be a success. People who know that democracy transcends individual political parties, that the sanctity of the process is more important then who wins; we need people who are bent on dedicating theirs lives to preserving democracy.

It will never happen.

Election Glitches Thwart Montgomery Voters
Inoperable Voting Machines Also Affect Parts of Pr. George's

By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 12, 2006; 12:08 PM

Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots.

By mid-morning, a bevy of statewide and local candidates had begun calling for polling stations to stay open past the scheduled 8 p.m. closing time. Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.

No electronic voting machines were operational when polls opened at 7 a.m. in Montgomery County, because election officials failed to deliver the required voter authorization cards to the county's 238 precincts. Voters were supposed to be given provisional paper ballots instead. But several precincts quickly ran out of those backup ballots.

At Lynkbrook School Center in Bethesda, one voter said poll workers went scurrying to a photocopy shop to make more provisional ballots.

"This is just obscene that we can live in one of the most forward-thinking counties in the country, and have so many advantages open to us, and for some reason we can't get our polls to work," said campaign volunteer Valerie Coll, who was stationed outside Cannon Road Elementary School in Silver Spring. She said poll workers turned voters away until the campaign volunteers told them to offer paper ballots instead.

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