Dear Senator: Our Election Mess is your Number One priority

[SoCalDem]

With the most important election of my time, or perhaps, any time, just around the corner, I am begging you to correct the ills of our election system.

It will be too late for this one, even though we all knew things were hopelessly screwed up, way back in 2000. In the intervening three plus years, it has only become more haphazard.

The millions of dollars provided by HAVA must have been spent on candy and hair barrettes, because the "new and improved" vapor-voting machines are hardly an improvement. It's as if you took a patient, ill with typhoid, and after treatment, you not only did not cure the typhoid, but now he has Ebola as well..

The constitution says that the states are in charge of their own elections, but that can (and should be) changed a bit..

I live in California, and I could not care less who the state legislators or state attorney general of Idaho is, but I DO CARE,very much, that the citizens of Idaho can cast a correct vote for the people they send to DC. I DO CARE that the votes that Idahoans cast for president are correctly registered.. Those national office elections in EVERY state DO AFFECT me, and I am tired of seeing the shenanigans in every state.

There is a simple way to do this, and it's totally non-partisan..


If nationally held offices were to be held in even years in all states, on a common standardized ballot for ALL states, things would be simple and accurate..

A 3 x 5 card could hold the names. There would be no need for fancy electronic voting computers. A card with a column for presidential, a column for congress, and a column for senate would suffice. The only other necessity would be a permanent marker, and a scanning counter.

The ballots would all be the same size. They would be easy to count, and there would be no complicated instructions necessary.

If the good people of Idaho want to order diamond-encrusted, platinum-plated Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia (or any number of other brands) DRE machines to elect the dog catcher or the municipal officials, that's perfectly OK with me.

BUT....

For the offices that REALLY MATTER nationally, we MUST have a uniform ballot, that is simple and effective.