You know they’ve got you when you are asked to produce the paper work proving your complaint or your point that your version of what transpired is the true one.  If you can’t show a paper trail with a date or a signature, you haven’t got a paper leg to stand on.  This is the way of a great deal of savings that we were introduced to when we were shown that – if we could show – a collection of receipts marked with the TAX paid on a purchase whether on a service performed or on a non-food grocery item, we could get reimbursement or, let us say, a deduction from our taxes at the end of the year.  This means that if we took the trouble to collect the little slips of papers itemizing our meals at restaurants and the receipts printed up at the counters of the stores we patronize, a sizeable sum results from this paper trail and we can, under the present laws, save money at tax time.

But it is at election time that such a paper trail becomes vitally important.  We loved the touch screen electronic marvels that appeared at polling stations because they allowed you to mark a “ballot” by making a selection touching a screen and the time flew by and the obscene number of choices you were presented with was over quickly, neatly, no fuss and bother and no tangible piece of paper to take home with you proving you did the deed. A purple thumb print might have sufficed.

That seems to be the sticking point over balloting in a democracy.  Let’s all show hands if we approve this motion made by some solon in our midst.  Now, it is sort of easy to distinguish if the nays have it over the yeas.  You count the hands and it is clear that one side wins over the other.  The problem with counting hands is that when they are lowered you have no permanent proof that what you saw was so.  The way things are organized in our democracy, you can have someone raise a doubt and the whole process is thrown out and you raise hands and count them once again.

Florida is at the point of changing the ‘better than skewering a paper ballot with hanging Chads’ system to an electronic screen and the totals appearing at the end counted by a built in computer calculator.  The system I was introduced to when I first came to Florida was that Chad producing one which was confusing and endless because so many judges and small officials had to be voted into office. Keeping an electronic balloting machine BUT with a paper receipt makes a lot more sense than the system that elected George W. Bush. You do know it was the ineptness of the Florida system that pointed up the whole election mess that we are so proud of?  Or, don’t you know it was Florida + the Republican ruthlessness + the compliant Supreme Court that handed the election to the gang that cannot run the country straight? Purple fingers will not do it.  Our technology should be able to produce an unambiguous paper trail that leaves a record straight to the presidency.