Bring back the paper ballot

As the January 1 deadline approaches, our country's voting system is far from reliable. Serious and ongoing problems with electronic voting machines have not been resolved and have already caused countless problems in terms of credible tallies. "Glitches" run the gamut from overcounted votes to votes lost altogether. I'm happy to see my new home state of North Carolina taking a proactive approach to dealing with Diebold. The state will not certify their machines unless they disclose the software code, a criteria rival manufacturer's are ready to meet but which Diebold claims would violate trade secrets.

The Impolitic continues to maintain that a private company should not be counting the public votes, particularly a company whose CEO publicly vowed to deliver Ohio to Bush in 04 and then apparently did so by screwing around with the software. Why the public has not raised an outcry and why public officials have not conducted a proper investigation is beyond me, but one thing is clear. We need more than a paper trail, we need a return to paper ballots counted by citizens, not computers and it doesn't matter if it takes a month to get a final tally. The integrity of the democratic process is worth waiting for.