FOLLOWING Democratic bitterness with the outcome of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress decided to get into the act with money and a mandate.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 provided the various states with money and a bureaucracy in which to bring voting to a minimum standard, including provisions for helping the disabled vote and for provisional ballots.
Congress gave the states more than $3 billion to replace punch-card and lever voting machines. New touch-screen voting machines would eliminate human error and political tampering.
Now, as the nation prepares for a presidential election, thousands of these machines sit in warehouses, still in their packaging, the Associated Press reported.
The new voting machines proved to be worse than the system they replaced. Votes vanish. There are breakdowns. There are malfunctions. And there is the realization that these machines can be hacked.
Nonetheless, West Virginia's Secretary of State, Betty Ireland, is standing by them.
She may be confident in the machines, but the public may not be. Ireland is not seeking another term.
The candidates seeking to succeed her should inform the public of how confident they are in machines that proved to be a problem elsewhere.
When the West Virginia democratic candidate for secretary of state said on state wide talk radio last Thursday, live from the state fair ground, that counting independent and third votes isn’t a matter of concern, I knew our democracy was done for because of the corruption of both political parties.
Politicians’s who dishonor our democracy prove why we need third party candidates to shake up the corruption. Let every vote count.