Does The Left Want Punchcard Ballots Or Electronic Voting?

07 Oct, 2003 by John Hawkins

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You just can’t win with the left when it comes to voting machines.

With punch card ballots, the left doesn’t like them because — let’s be totally honest here — a certain percentage of people on the left are too dumb to correctly punch a hole in a piece of paper. The ACLU even tried to stop the California recall because they said, “8 million California voters could be disfranchised by what it described as defective machines that still use punch card ballots.” Yeah….sure. That’s silly given that we’ve been using punch card ballots for decades, but if you do believe that, the solution is to move to electronic voting.

But the left has a problem with electronic voting too. We’re constantly hearing claims from people on the left that electronic balloting is too easy to rig. That’s not an unreasonable concern. In fact, I’ve had concerns about that myself although unlike many people on the left, I’m not a crackpot who cries “fraud” every time someone in the GOP loses an election. But the reality is, anytime you work with computers, there is always an offhand chance that some malevolent cyber-genius is going to figure out how to abuse the code.

So what we have to face is the reality that there is no such thing as a perfect “fraud proof” system of voting. So which is it? Electronic voting, punch cards, or something else? Personally, it’s all the same to me. We could even just make “x’s” on sheets of paper beside of the candidate we want as far as I’m concerned (although that still might be a bit too complex for Palm Beach Democrats =D). In the end, we can make any of these systems work, it’s just a matter of picking one and dealing with the fact that it has strengths and weaknesses.