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This article could have been subtitled "Requiem for Manjoo". Good job! The only thing I would have added would be a brief history of how the country got into its current mess. Why will 2/3 of us cast our votes on machines so vulnerable to error that deciding an election with a friendly game of rock, paper, scissors might make as much sense?
The voters did not ask for E-Voting. The election boards did not demand it. Soon to be incarcerated Bob Ney and his soon to be incarcerated buddy Jack Abramoff thought it would be a good idea, and they got Congress to go along with it in the form of HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, which I tend to think of as Hack America's Vote Act.
HAVA was supposed to give the nation a uniform voting standard so we would never have to examine a hanging chad again. However, the Republican Party thrives on nonuniform voting standards. Nonuniform voting standards are how you suppress the opposition's vote and augment your own vote. This is why the GOP is all about state's right and local control of elections.
In Bush v. Gore, the court indicated that decision was not meant to be a precedent setting one. The majority was not advocating federal government interference in local election decisions---say, in cases involving routine Voting Rights Act abuses. This is because Bush v. Gore was decided not on the merits of the case but rather on the identity of the parties involved.
HAVA was analogous. It did not indicate a desire on the part of Ney and Abramoff to enforce uniform voting standard across the country. HAVA was about getting a lot of E Voting equipment installed in a lot of polling places quickly, with a minimum of fuss. Now, E-Voting was in its infancy. The machines were still poorly designed. They had not been well tested. So, who was going to want to be the guinea pig? No one. No problem. Just make it illegal not to have the machines and give out FREE federal money to buy them.
I don't know about other people, but when I am staring at the computer screen and I remember that Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff are the reason I am forced to vote on this experimental technology, I do not get a warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I get sort of queasy.
