To the Moon, Alice

The good thing about being a former media person is that I won’t have to stay up all Election Night doing broadcasts or trying to meet a newspaper deadline. I may be up anyway, but it will be a lot easier consuming the news than reporting it. But why does it take so long?

It’s 2008, and I’ve felt for years that Election Night should take about 15 minutes. The last polls close and bang! There’s the final number. Here’s another sentence that begins, “We can send men (and women) to the moon, why can’t we…?

Elections should be simple and standardized, and I’ve always wondered why we all couldn’t vote on the Internet. You can buy almost anything securely; many folks even file their tax returns electronically. So why couldn’t they vote the same way? There wouldn’t be a need for expensive voting machines of multiple kinds. We are used to the Internet now, and those who aren’t could be easily shown how to vote by click. After you vote, you could print out a record of what you’d done. Heck, maybe you could even change your mind at the last minute, by signing in securely and amending your vote. 

Before I began the third sentence of the last paragraph, I already heard the screams: YOU’RE NUTS! I know -- some hacker could run away with our election. Like there aren’t zillions of “hacking” incidents already going on, even with paper ballots.

But I have a feeling the real obstacles in the way of an accurate count have to do with the non-standardization of laws and procedures and plain old human error, and I cling to the feeling that these problems are soluble. Yeah, it takes money. But what could be higher on our priority list than bringing our voting systems up to speed? Why can they count votes in Iraq faster than here?

We’ve been to the moon so often that it’s almost boring. Can’t we have our best minds working on this problem?

There, now I’ve said it.