''PEARLS ON A PIG''

Kurt Zumdieck offers this reponse to MoveOn's "Repair the Vote" effort, which still allows the use of e-voting machines ("DRE's"): "My friend's basset hound arrived on my doorstep for a stay, wrapped in a pearl choker. So I thought I'd lead with that image, pearls on a pig, to describe my interest in voting reform that has anything to do with DRE's. Read the article by our favorite English saucier for Vanity Fair, March 2005, Christopher Hitchens, who gave us the two words that should live in voting infamy, "KENYON COLLEGE!" Kids stood in line until 4am to vote, well after they stole the damn thing. Not only will DRE's always be hackable and expensive, they are slow, slow, slow.. When the local Republicans saw that registration was up at the college, they took a couple machines away and one crapped out. California banned DRE's because Diebold, Sequoia and the other voting machine companies wouldn't make the changes that MoveON PAC wants them to make now. We progressives need to show more political savvy than this. Nothing good is going to come out of Washington DC while Rove and the Republicans are at the levers. Look what they did to HAVA. It is a trojan horse to get us more e-voting machines. Optical scan machines are the only way to go. We need to put printers on them, make them no-spoilage, tally the votes there in the precinct, and then post them on the door. Call the results in and we have a system like they have in Canada. One machine can handle a whole polling place. The machines need to be owned by the States, etc, etc,..... But fundamental to this problem is that our ballots have no legal standing. It is not like a will or a deed. Whether provisional or not, votes can be thrown in the trash with impunity. All you have to do is go to Ohio or New Mexico and look in some of those dumpsters. Stella still has her pearls on after six days, maybe we should change them."