My main reaction to this Washington Post editorial on the sorry state of voting machines in the United States is that I wonder where the editors think the money for this expense will come from? Speaking for my city and state, there isn’t enough money to pay for the commitments we’ve already made let alone for buying new voting machines every ten years.
For most of the history of this country written ballots were the norm. Our romance with the voting machine didn’t really catch fire until the introduction of the Votomatic in 1965. The demand for going to something other than punched card voting was sparked by the debacle of the 2000 presidential election (“dangling chads”, anyone?).
However, there’s an unforeseen problem. A Votomatic machine could be maintained indefinitely—that’s the nature of electro-mechanical devices. As long as the parts are available and you replace the part every so often, you can keep them running. Today’s fully electronic, computerized voting machines are based on what I think of as “ephemeral technology”. There’s a sort of planned obsolescence. They’re dependent on components that will stop being made sooner rather than later so their life expectancy is a lot shorter than the old electro-mechanicals. In using fully electronic, computerized voting machines, state and local boards of election have mounted the technological treadmill that’s familiar to just about any business owner.
I honestly don’t know how any jurisdiction that doesn’t print its own money can expect to stay on that technological treadmill for their voting machines.
Some states have adopted Internet voting. I’m pretty sure I know how that would work out in Chicago. Not only would the dead never leave the voting rolls, they’d all have cellphones.
