Always rippin on Ohio...

Speaking of the 2004 election, The St. Petersburg Times opened like this: “Is Florida still the love of your life, or have the corn fields and mill towns of Ohio won you over?”
Excuse me? Mill towns and corn fields? Way to spread the stereotype, Florida. Just because they had one election where they didn’t matter as much as us farmers in our fields, they get angry. NOT COOL. Okay, so that election was left up to my home state, the glorious Ohio. After many debates about how to vote, which state to worry about, Ohio won out.
But what was the main issue clouding over this election? The method of voting. Since the mayhem in Florida in 2000, many worried about new electronic ballots and whether the old system would still work in some areas of the country. After Florida decided to ditch the chads and go for a electronic system, many states followed in their sandy footsteps.
According to an article in the New York Times, many states are fed up with the new system and want the next election to go back to the paper trail.
“Because of numerous glitches, breakdowns and failures with those machines, Florida’s governor earlier this year banned them from federal elections. And a Senator from Florida has just co-sponsored a bill in Congress to ban those same machines from the entire country, starting in 2012.” Florida also wants there to be a mandate that all 50 states have paper ballots by next year. A little aggressive? Also, a little reminder- just because they’re paper doesn’t mean they will definitely work.
Just because Florida had problems in the past doesn’t mean they should lead a rebellion against all electronic systems everywhere. Many states want to fit the electronic systems to have printers, and therefore paper trails to each of them. The setbacks are obvious- they could jam, maybe not print.
But since the voting problems in 2000 and 2004, how much has been done to make sure this upcoming election will be secure and efficient? Not all that much. Politicians are focusing on lawsuits and retrofitting machines instead of fixing the real problem at hand. We need a way to vote that people understand, whether it be electronic or with crayon. If our representatives are too hung up on suing people and making people conform to one system, we lose the time and energy to do what we need: fix the problem. The electronic systems are fixable. Why don’t we try to fix them?
Time is running out, people. We tried them years ago and had some glitches. So now we need to find those glitches and solve the problem. Politicians would rather ignore them and go back to hiring old ladies to count paper ballots by hand, which is fine. But when we have the technology at hand, why ignore it? We’re only going to look at it again years from now when new officials decide that the chads are useless. We have had since 2000 to really take a look at the election process. But not much is changing. People are proposing that we change the entire system, and have different states vote in different cycles each year. Newsweek showed a few new ideas for voting in our country that could work. So why are real issues like this being looked at last, when we have a major election coming up?
Because politicians are nervous, and don’t know for sure what’s going to happen in next year’s election. No one does. But change needs to happen soon, or else the next voting process will be far more confusing than it has to be.