Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Voting Booth Metaphor . . .

New Yorkers faced their new voting machines yesterday.  After the usual sign in, you are given a paper ballot,  go to a little booth to fill in circles with a black pencil for your choices (being very careful to stay inside the circles), then walk to a machine and feed it the ballot.

With the old voting machines that were used for around 80 years, it was ...
 bing-bing-bing whoosh/ding 
. . . and you were done.  You closed the curtain, pulled the levers for your choices, and registered the ballot by opening the curtain.

It now takes 5 times as long to cast a ballot as it used to. . . . and with all the high tech equipment and paper manipulation probably costs the taxpayers a lot more too.  It seem that the more we "progress," the further behind we get.

The new voting process is more complicated.  It takes more of your time and more of your money. . . . 

Isn't this just like the government that designed it?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One would hazzard to guess that someone made a ton of money through the "paper" supplier. That is typical of New York State. But the most serious flaw in the new/ old system is that there is no absolute voter privacy. How one voted can be seen by others at the submittal stage. The less than private cubicles are sort of funny. I spotted several people leaning over to speak with others filling out the paper ballots. Wasn't Joe Griffo on the committee that selected this near laughable system? Someone should ask him to defend it and study his contributor list.

Anonymous said...

So much for the going green initiative What goes around comes around..paper ballot!!