The Improving World of Voting
I looked up some articles on the new forms of voting to see whether they were successful or not. What I found was surprising to me. I didn’t think there would be as many people using e-voting machines this year as there actually were. In CNN.com's article, "Voting Methods Under Close Watch", apparently Georgia spent $54 million on touch screen voting machines throughout the entire state. They didn’t want to end up like Florida did in the last election so they felt that it was necessary to update their voting methods. Los Angles County registrar of elections Conny McCormack talked about how the move to total electronic voting machines would cost somewhere around $100 million to $120 million and changes like this wouldn’t be made without a lot of consideration. McCormack did claim that he was happy with the present e-voting machines that the county did have for early voting but they still wanted to wait until e-voting technology matured more before they made the switch.
People who used the e-voting machines all seemed very happy with the experience that it gave them. Ken Meehan of Las Vegas said, “‘Technology, we hope, is for the best today. It's better than writing a name on a piece of paper. I'll have to go with the technology.' “Joyce Hicks, also of Nevada had a similar reaction saying, “‘I love the machines. They're very convenient.' “Additional opinions can be found in the CNN article "Nevada improves odds with e-vote." You will notice that the people continue to support the new technique claiming that it is easier to use and much easier to correct mistakes with.
Experts on the use of e-voting machines claim that one reason why these machines can be trusted is because of the paper trail that the machines generate when people vote. These paper trails can be used as a hard copy of the votes that have taken place in the event of a system malfunction. One main point that was brought up was that elections have been tampered with throughout the course of history. The only thing we the people can do about this is spot the problem, correct the issue, and then try to improve things the next time around. So although these systems of e-voting could be potentially vulnerable, experts on them say they are perfectly fine and secure.
Moving on to the topic of the coverage of the campaign I found this election to be a lot lower key than those of past years. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the NBA opening night of games was on the same night and a lot of people would want to see those games over election results but I really don’t know if that can be the true reason. CNN.com was a very useful site to see how the states were breaking down and it kept track of electoral votes per candidate. This allowed for easy viewing of the most current results. When the election came down to Ohio I couldn’t help but feel like history was repeating itself except this time Ohio was the victim and not Florida. Luckily, though, after some time was spent counting absentee ballots, Kerry eventually conceded to Bush thus preventing another dispute for the presidency like what happened in Florida a year ago. I also just wanted to point out something that I found pretty funny about this years election results. If you look at a map that has the breakdown of what states voted for whom, it looks a lot like the map of Union vs. Confederate states. It really shows how close of an election this really was.
Personally I didn’t interact with this election because I didn’t stand behind either candidate. I made the choice not to vote because I felt that no matter who got elected into office this time around the only real loser was going to be the American public because neither man really seemed fit to lead this nation. This decision not to vote is one that was extremely easy for me and I know that I can sleep at night knowing that I didn’t support either candidate. If I had to choose on candidate though, I would have chosen Sen. Kerry. He won the state of Massachusetts anyways so it’s not like my vote would have truly mattered in the end.
The web, TV, and print didn’t influence my decision as much as you would think. I used the web mainly to get the candidates view points on topics that held a lot of importance to me and then made my decision from that. The only thing TV and print did was continue to update me on what each candidate was doing so I could see that they weren’t making any sudden changes in their stances. I would have to say thought that the internet does in fact make access to information such as a candidate’s stance on a certain issue much more readily accessible and thus making it that much easier to pick a candidate. I don’t know if I’d go to voting on the web quite yet due to the fact that system is still largely under construction still and although it can be extremely secure I think hackers would work their hardest to be able to say that they brought a presidential election down.
