VOTING SITCH

Even though I'm still elated about the Democratic (big and little d) victory last night, I think it needs to be said that we have to fix our voting system. The issues raised by Black Box Voting and the "Hacking Democracy" documentary still need to be addressed.

Private companies managing the most important element of our democracy--i.e., the franchise--is unacceptable. If nothing else, Diebold and the other companies must be forced to allow their proprietary software to be open to vigorous scrutiny by the people who are paying good money to use it.

Because '08 will be here before we know it, and we can't have the kinds of things that happened this time happening then--or any time. Not that I think we lucked out this time. We obviously overwhelmed any diabolical scheme about vote rigging with sheer numbers. But until we make election days national holidays, we can't always count on overwhelming numbers. But we should always be able to count on the reliability of the vote-taking and especially the vote-counting.

I should point out, though, that my voting experinece on a Diebold touch screen machine (with paper trail!) couldn't have gone more smoothly--no glitches, no flipping, no discrepancies between onscreen display and printout. But still...