You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time
From the L.A. Times:
Proposition 98
- Yes 39.1%
- No 60.9%
Proposition 99
- Yes 62.4%
- No 37.6%
Prop 99 was actually weaker than I would have liked–I would have preferred a measure that banned eminent domain for private development, period, not just for owner occupied residences–but 98 was just over the top.
Of course now we get to miss the fun of watching the courts sort out the mess that would have resulted if both had passed, since they actively contradicted each other.
Yesterday I also got to try electronic voting for the first time. The machines here in Irvine had voter verified paper ballots, and I think they were a definite improvement over the mechanical machines I’ve used in the past (and never trusted). However user interface wise they were a disaster. You had to use a scroll wheel to move to the candidate of your choice, which was very nonintuitive. It was easy to miss a ballot completely, and hard to vote for only three candidates when you were allowed to vote for six. In fact, initially I wasn’t sure that was even possible. Write-in candidates had to be entered by scrolling the wheel around an alphabet to spell out a name. Surely we can do better than this?
June 4th, 2008 at 12:10 PM
Scannable mark-sense paper ballots still rule. No accidental resets, no chad, paper trail, and instant (tentative) results. “Make all marks heavy and black.”