"Innovations" in Voting

Electronically-tallied voting is very, very useful, because it's quite fast. Texas used to have a near-ideal system: a paper ballot was marked by drawing straight lines to complete arrows, and an optical scanner read down the center of the arrows, synchronized to the location on the page by markings along the edges. It was fast, it was accurate, and it preserved a paper record of each vote.

Most recent voting "innovations" have been pretty bad, though. I include in the list of "bad" - for our Republic - innovations: direct election of pretty much every officer of government, motor voter laws, letting felons vote, letting non-citizens vote, letting people with no other vested stake in society (property, dependent children, corporate ownership, prior service or what have you) vote, not checking IDs against rolls at the polling places, "simplified" absentee balloting (no proof of identity required), lowered voting ages, federal funding of campaigns, campaign finance restrictions, ballot access restrictions and increased regulations allowing technicalities to disqualify legally-cast votes.

All of these fall into one of three categories: they reduce choice in candidates, give people a vote where they will suffer little ill effect if they vote badly, and/or increase fraud/reducing reliability. The current generation of computerized voting machines falls into the latter category, and the first lawsuit attempting to demonstrate this has been filed. (And with the evidence so far, it's looking like November and December, 2004 are going to be every bit as interesting as November and December, 2000.)