Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, Green, Peace & Freedom, or Independent, one thing you probably noticed, or had pointed out by someone on the television news, is how well the election went – few errors, and seemingly none that would change the results of any contest, national, state, or more local.

It truly is amazing how few difficulties we have had, although with the immense turnout that was seen here in California, we are seeing the various counties’ Registrars complain that the systems in place are at their limits, and will not be ready for another election with larger voter turnout (and since we only reached low 80 percentile levels, we should all be hoping for larger turnout!).

It does seem that, one of the things we should have nationalized in this country, is the voting method. Machines should be developed, tested, and perfected at the federal level, so that a uniformity can be counted on, and each subsequent election yields greater precision.

I had the opportunity to work for the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters this year. The amount of wasted time and effort at the place is amazing.  I thought one had to look in the area of big industry to find so many people so interested in doing so little. Beyond the collective attitude of the permanent workers, the system of vote tabulation is something better used for tens of votes, rather than hundreds of thousands of votes. As I watched the nightly news, I saw that the uniformity I hope for is not found even at a state-wide level, as the Los Angeles County ballots look like ‘60s era IBM punch cards – at least they are thinking about the trees!

The machines used to count votes are so imperfect as to defy any logic in their use. The ballots are large (larger than legal size paper), and every time a new box is opened, trees in the forest shudder, awaiting the next harvest. As the ballot, which many times has been folded, and explicitly mutilated is fed into the large, unwieldy machine the operator winces, hoping that the reading is correct, and the precious thin cardboard is not horrendously shredded, never again able to be read. These machines use technology that was invented about the same time as the mimeograph! (Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall’s! … for those less than thirty, F&W was a popular seller of encyclopedia) Paper jams are so frequent, prayers are heard before each run of ballots.

This is the 21st century! Why should this be so? Hanging chads, shredded cardboard, and magnetic cards not properly decoded should be a thing of the past. Machines that look like farm equipment, with their attending noise levels, should be relegated to the scrap heap, or donated to Russia (where the results are frequently known before the day of the election).

Now that we have a president that was elected by a less-than-close margin (whew!), perhaps we can get to work on voting machines that will make the elections of 2000 and 2004 fade further into the collective memory.