Fixing what's not broken
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ou know that old saying about the futile act of closing the barn door after the horses have run off? There's a New Jersey Democrat, Rep. Rush D. Holt, who's invented a way to make it even more absurd: He'd first like to replace the barn doors, at great expense, before closing them.
In Congress, cluelessness knows no bounds.
Holt is pushing a bill that would mandate a paper trail for electronic balloting. It requires a specific kind of paper -- not the kind used in Utah's $27 million worth of new electronic voting machines. Furthermore, Holt's bill would mandate the use of optically scanned ballots -- again, not the technology Utah has already invested $27 million to purchase, and the state's counties millions more to train poll workers, and store and maintain the new touch-screen machines.
Level-headed realists in Utah and elsewhere might be safe laughing this off as a foolhardy attempt to up-end the nation's election system for the second time in five years. But these sorts of things can't be ignored, because you never know whether or not mass insanity on the issue will infect a majority of the U.S. House and Senate.
After 2002, most states opted to transition to electronic balloting in accordance with the Help America Vote Act. That shake-up was prompted by the so-called "hanging" and "dimpled" chads in the Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election. Despite Utah never having had those kinds of problems with its mechanical, punch-card voting system, it was forced to buy the new machines.
State officials were wise to select machines that recorded tallies both electronically and on cash register-like paper as a back-up for audits and recounts.
The first time the machines were widely used in Utah -- November 2006 -- there were few glitches and most people, and poll workers, gave the machines high marks.
Precisely why, then, New Jersey's Holt would be advocating a plan that wastes the hundreds of millions of dollars -- the federal government has pledged to help states like Utah buy their machines -- is unclear. As with the fabled barn doors, he's arriving at the negotiations after all the decisions have been made and the participants have gone home.
We hope his colleagues in Washington deep-six this plan. It's unnecessary and wasteful.
