Sunday, November 14, 2004

Voting Irregularities? Probably Due to Incompetence.

Interesting article at TomPaine.com. But I think that they assume too much. To the extent that there were not enough voting machines and that hampered the vote, I believe in the old maxim "don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence."
Someone was sleeping on the job and therefore forgot to make certain that there were enough machines in the minority districts.
This is another problem with machine voting; if turnout is high, you can't easily increase the capacity to handle voters, because it is difficult to bring out new machines on the spot.
But with, say, optical scanner paper ballots (the kind you where you fill in boxes like it's the SAT), you can always set up more booths, and for that matter, you should be able to easily print out new ballots.

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