{"id":3951,"date":"2006-12-26T15:30:29","date_gmt":"2006-12-26T23:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=3951"},"modified":"2006-12-27T02:10:56","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T10:10:56","slug":"orlando-sentinel-the-experiment-with-touch-screen-voting-is-a-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=3951","title":{"rendered":"Orlando Sentinel: &#8216;The Experiment With Touch-Screen Voting is a Failure&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <em>Orlando Sentinel<\/em> sends me a Christmas gift. While it&#8217;s not <i>exactly<\/i> that I may have asked for, this being the charitable season I&#8217;ll look the other way and be thankful for what I got. Particularly as the <i>Sentinel<\/i> (or the <em>Slantinel<\/em> as some in the Sunshine State aptly refer to it) has never been particularly democracy-friendly.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"pullquote\"><!--\"The hard-fought right to vote isn't worth much without the confidence the votes will count.\"--><\/span>Here then, a few highlights from their weekend editorial entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.orlandosentinel.com\/news\/opinion\/orl-ed24106dec24,0,2570714.story?coll=orl-opinion-headlines\">&#8220;Drop touch-screens &#8211; Our position: It&#8217;s time to pull the plug on the failed experiment of electronic voting&#8221;<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"media\">Nothing is more sacred or vital to the survival of democracy than the ability to cast a vote with the confidence that vote will be counted accurately.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nWhatever happens in the race between Ms. Jennings and Mr. Buchanan, <strong>one thing is clear: The experiment with touch-screen voting is a failure<\/strong>. Florida and other states should scrap touch-screens and use the pen-and-paper ballots of the optical-scan method, allowing a verifiable, independent recount.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\n[P]aper-trail systems present other problems. Printers can jam and run out of paper. There is ample evidence that today&#8217;s touch-screen machines are too complicated for volunteer poll workers to handle, and adding a printer would only make that worse.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\n[S]aving money is the last reason to use these flawed touch-screen machines. If we are going to spend money on anything, it should be on elections.<\/p>\n<p>Generations of soldiers have paid a much higher price in securing the right to vote from themselves and others, fighting and dying in places like Lexington and Concord to Kabul and Baghdad.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s remember that the hard-fought right to vote isn&#8217;t worth much without the confidence the votes will count.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Orlando Sentinel sends me a Christmas gift. While it&#8217;s not exactly that I may have asked for, this being the charitable season I&#8217;ll look the other way and be thankful for what I got. Particularly as the Sentinel (or the Slantinel as some in the Sunshine State aptly refer to it) has never been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,180,16],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-reform","category-fl-13","category-florida","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3951"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=3951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}