George Will explains what happens when the federal government tries to fix the “voting” problem discovered after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. The feds passed the Help America Vote Act that gave the states $3.8 billion to buy electronic voting machines. One week from today, this spending will go down in history with the phrase, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you.”
Read Will’s article here, it’s great.
Here is a sample:
Today’s political climate
— hyperpartisanship leavened by paranoia and exploited by a national
surplus of lawyers — makes this an unpropitious moment for introducing
new voting technologies that will be administered by poll workers who
often are retirees for whom the task of working a DVD player is a
severe challenge. Furthermore, an election is, after all, a government
program, and readers of Genesis know that new knowledge often brings
trouble. So we should not be surprised if, on Nov. 7, new voting
machinery does what new technologies — dams, bridges, steamships,
airplanes — have done through history: malfunction.
