Moron voting machines

Holy cow! as Harry Carey used to say. My last post - about voting machines ("A post-election rant,"Advice Line, 11/8/2006), that asked how it's possible that such a simple problem has been turned into such a collosal fiasco - led to more response than anything else I've written here, with the possible exception of the time I brought up birthday parties and Jehovah's Witnesses ("Handling an employee who refuses t

Holy cow! as Harry Carey used to say. My last post - about voting machines ("A post-election rant,"Advice Line, 11/8/2006), that asked how it's possible that such a simple problem has been turned into such a collosal fiasco - led to more response than anything else I've written here, with the possible exception of the time I brought up birthday parties and Jehovah's Witnesses ("Handling an employee who refuses to celebrate," Advice Line, 1/4/2006, and please ... no more on that one!)

To those who disagreed, complaining that I oversimplified a problem that really is complex, I have three things to say:

• I'm completely unencumbered by facts, and plan to keep it that way. That's why it's called a rant, and not a well-reasoned critique of the situation. Hey, sometimes a guy just has to have fun, and what can be more fun than criticizing the hard work of people you don't know and will never meet? (Please - don't post any comments in response to that question either. I have to filter out enough spam comments as it is.)

• Scope creep: I bet that a big reason for the unwarranted complexity is that we're asking these systems to do more than record and tally votes - probably, some well-intentioned system designer or sponsor figured out that since we're going through the trouble, we might as well ask the system to keep track of voters, their registrations, where they should vote, whether they already voted someplace else, what the exit polls said, traffic conditions, and a bunch of other useful things to do that have nothing to do with recording and tallying votes. Put all that stuff in future releases and the problem becomes much more manageable.