Electronic voting comes to rural Wisconsin

und83

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Tuesday September 12, 2006 · 11:09 AM PDT

2006/09/12 · 11:09

I live in a small town in rural central Wisconsin. I've been here for 11 years, and it's a nice place, though not particularly modern. Indeed, when I voted here for the first time in 1995, I was surprised to find a vestige of a past I'd only heard about or seen in the movies. Voting was still done with paper ballots, with people putting their X's on a line or in a box while standing behind a curtain.

All the problems with butterfly ballots, hanging chads, touch screens -- yes, they were bad, and they probably cost two good men the Presidency (and who knows how many good people lost lower office because of them). But they were someone else's problem. We here still had the relatively foolproof paper ballots.

Well, the so-called "Help America Vote Act" came to the boonies with today's Wisconsin primary. And based on my admittedly unscientific look as I cast my first electronic ballot today, Wisconsin just might be doing it right. Read More

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