Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Hand-counting our votes -- it's as American as apple pie!

I was talking to Andy Johnson on WNNR in Jacksonville yesterday. We were talking about election fraud -- and suddenly my childhood memories started flooding back to me.

"When I was a little girl," I said, "my mother used to have the polling place in our home. We would strip away the front room furniture and put up the voting booths. All the neighbors would trudge in and we knew most of them and met the rest." It was a happy time and we looked forward to it.

My mother would put out cookies and help old ladies up and down the stairs. There was a community feeling about voting day. Patriotic. "But the part I remember most happened after the polls had closed. The precinct ladies would gather around the dining room table and hand-tally the votes." How American can you be? As American as apple pie.

"I miss those days, Andy."

Who would you trust most to accurately count your vote? Electronic machines with faulty programming, easy hacker access and NO PAPER TRAIL? Or your mom?

Whether Americans use hand-counted paper ballots or just mail in our votes like they now do in Oregon, let's do SOMETHING to make our election system more trust-worthy. Right now, the only difference between American elecition fraud and Ukrainian election fraud is that the Ukrainians protested theirs. Americans didn't.

That's not fair! Since when did the Ukrainians start to have more apple pie there than here?