Paper Ballots = Big Expense, Waste...

Here's Our Suggestion: You Want a Receipt? Then Drop a Dollar in the Ballot Box. THERE'S YOUR PROOF ......


      America sometimes makes us a little sick as it goes along.  No one liked paper ballots, or the huge pull arm polling stations. So, they came up with electronic voting. But, since we are a nation of paaranoia, everyone thinks they're too apt to failure and tampering - as opposed to throwing a box full of paper ballots in the Black Creek...


     So, here in Yankeeville, they came up with another wrinkle to assuage their fears - the paper ballot for electronic voting. It's like a big Scantron Sheet, similar to when you took the SAT or ASVAB tests in High School.  You fill it out, the machine reads it, and processes the votes into the machine, where it is reviewed by the voter, who then approves it. Sounds all fine and well, right?  Sure, but there is one major, costly problem....


    You see, the local election boards must guess exactly how many people will come to the polls in November.  A good forecaster will be worth his weight in gold, but this is a local government department we're talking about, where a college degree is about as rare as Halley's Comet.  Let's just say the guesstimates up here were kinda off - WAY OFF...


   According to n article in yesterday's Newsday, Nassau and Suffolk counties printed 1,780,000 total ballots. At first thought, 'Wednesday, Thursday, Friday' is our first thought. There are barely 3 million total residents in both counties. Our guess is that they printed one for every single registered voter on Long Island.  Even basing estimates from the mammoth 2008 presidential vote wouldn't cause them to print a million. This was an midterm election, so our first thought is to print a half million....But what do we know.



    So, how many were used?  Right where we said as a guess - 515,000.  So, both counties are left with nearly 1.3 MILLION unused ballots at 59 cents a pop to print, which is about $800,000 ... It gets worse. They have to keep all those unused ballots in storage until the next election cycle in two years, which is expected to tack on another half million dollars.  Sick yet?  That sound you hear is the giant sucking sound of wasted tax dollars...


   No, electronic voting is not perfect. But, there hasn't been a case of tampering proven yet. Yeah, they lock up and crash at times, but a vote hasn't been proven to be lost yet.  For some of us, that's not good enough. We need to come up with other ideas to make them feel more secure - and it costs more. It always costs more... Here's our solution: you want a frickin' piece of paper to feel like your vote counted?  Pay a buck at the poll.  Not good enough, tough shit.  It's only worked this way for the past 230 years....

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