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Paper, not electrons,
key to voting

It's shocking -- shocking -- that people are suspicious of computerized voting machines, considering computers have a long history of rarely crashing during important projects, never eating one's homework and, when incapacitated, can be recalled to their duty simply by flipping through a small manual of the sort used to engage the main engines of the USS Enterprise.

The preceding paragraph, boys and girls, is an example of what we in the writing game call "sarcasm."

That means that, though I said it is shocking that voters are suspicious of electronic voting machines, I meant just the opposite. But anyone with a computer and a brain doesn't have to be told that. Because anyone with a brain knows that every computer he has ever owned, going back to the time of FORTRAN, DOS, CPM and up through floppy discs the size of Frisbees to floppy discs the size of bagels to floppy discs the size of smaller bagels to hard drives and zip drives and Pentium chips and God knows what else is out there today -- everyone knows that these computers have ALWAYS never worked right.

The one element that computer engineers have managed to create without fault is the ability of a computer to sense when an important paper is due, when a deadline is at hand, when a calculation is essential or when you are about reach your personal best level at Doom or Grand Theft Auto and freeze up, crash or simply post a cryptic message such as "Cache Memory Mode Artichoke Level Dangerously Arbitrary -- Smoke Break Hinted."

In fact -- and I swear on the heads of Bill Gate's children, should he ever have any -- that I would have had this very column finished an hour and a half ago, except the newspaper computer program in charge of writing and editing went on walkabout.

Why? Because this program hates our guts. And anything it can do to ruin someone's day, it will. Now, the computer programmers on staff will come up with come technical gobbledygook to explain the crash, but trust me, the mainframe simply has a bad attitude.

And that is why it is surprising that the makers of computerized voting machines tell us that their machines work so well that they do not need any paper backup of votes. You are talking to people who keep a hard copy of recipes they've called up on their computer. People who print out addresses and correspondence and the Web address of their favorite porn sites (other people, I'm talking about) because they have been burned 100 too many times.

Thankfully, Hawaii legislators are not buying the sunshine being blown up their chambers by people trying to sell us electronic voting machines. Both the Senate and House are pushing bills that will require printouts to verify votes cast by electronic machines.

Techno-geeks will allege this is simply the paranoia of the computer-illiterate. No, these are realists with actual historical knowledge of how computers work. And how do they work? Each succeeding generation of computer has always worked better, but they have never worked right.

And the last place you want a computer to crash is when people are going to the polls and half the voters think the other half is trying to rip off the election. Many people are still not over Bush's FIRST election, and that's when Florida was using paper ballots. We would have a full-scale revolution if that election had been completely computerized, the computers crashed and Jeb Bush said, "We have no paper record to back this up, but trust me, my brother won."

There's an old poker saying: Trust everyone but cut the cards. When it comes to voting, trust everyone but keep a printout. Or three.