... but I was happy to be handed a paper ballot at my polling place this morning; before the last election, for a couple of years we used the touch screen system, which I not only worried would be unreliable but found cumbersome with the long, long California ballots that required navigating screen after screen.

The paper ballot didn't need any special instructions, only required a pen, and was easy to review to verify my selections. The ballot was put into a folder and handed to a pollworker who fed it into the scanning machine by the edge while the ballot was still hidden by the cover of the folder, so my privacy was protected. A light turned green to indicate my ballot had been scanned and the counter on the machine clicked up (I was apparently the 13th person to vote in my precinct this morning). I don't know what would have happened if the ballot hadn't scanned properly, but I would hope the machine would void it and a new ballot could be issued for a revote, so there would be no problems with ballots being invalid due to errors in filling them out (no optical equivalent of hanging chads!). I don't know, but it seems logical that the machine would also time and date stamp the ballots, so it can be verified that they were cast at that time. The end of the ballot was torn off as my receipt -- it has numbers and a bar code on it, so presumably the individual ballots can be traced and accounted for. It seemed about as safe and verfiable as any system could be.

Maybe even more importantly, because no machines were necessary to fill out my ballot, the number of people who could vote at a time was not limited by the number of machines. Since long waits to use machines has been a problem in recent elections with heavy turnouts, this is a huge benefit of using a simple paper ballot over any kind of mechanical system.

My initial reaction was "big fat hairy deal" -- as others have said, unlike other men in public life who have been brought down for seeing prostitutes and other sexual peccadillos (or not -- Larry Craig and David Vitter are still in the Senate, aren't they?), Spitzer wasn't elected on a platform of personal morality. When I read through all the letters, I did find the arguments of an attorney general being held to a higher standard for obeying the law a little more persuasive of wrongdoing. So I did a little research and learned that patronizing a prostitute isn't even a felony in New York: unless the prostitute is under 18 it's only a Class B misdemeanor -- that's barely a crime.

But what I find really annoying is the over-the-top hyperbole of Leonard's piece. As someone else pointed out, saying he was "involved with a prostitution ring" suggests that he was involved in the running of it, rather than being a customer. Did he even know the call girls he was seeing were part of a "ring"? Should he have? Are men required to do some kind of due diligence investigation on the exact structure of a hooker's business before utilizing her services?

And then there's the word "monumental" -- oh please! Get ahold of yourself! Does this in any way detract from all the things that he's accomplished? Does a personal act like patronizing a prostitute make him any less a crusader against corruption in among the rich a powerful?

Maybe if people like Leonard didn't put fallible human beings on lofty pedestals they wouldn't be set up for a monumental fall.