Voting in the Brazos Valley

Today, I voted for the first time here in Texas. It was a referendum on a proposed property tax freeze for senior citizens over 65 and some disabled people. To get a further understanding about the debate over this issue, check out the KEOS website at www.keos.org.

As a note to the community, if you need to know where to go to vote here in Brazos County, there's a listing of all the precient locations in a pdf document at this site: http://www.brazosvotes.org/elections/2004_Primary/2004PollingPlaces.pdf

The reason I'm posting this to the blog really doesn't have anything to do with the referendum, but it has everything to do with voting machines. You see, this is the first time I have encountered such a contraption. It wasn't a touch-screen system, but it didn't give a paper recipt of how I voted. I'm somewhat concerned about that. There was a printer device with what looked like reciept paper in it, but it wasn't used to print out a record of my vote. It was used to print out a login to the machine.

The machine was fairly simple to operate, but I could see how someone who was not computer-saavy might find it difficult. On the positive side, it did show me my vote and asked me to confirm the vote before counting it. While that makes feel a tiny bit better, it's not all right in my mind. I mean, a hacker could easily get into the system and change the vote to whatever they wanted. Granted, most of your disgruntled hackers are probably disgruntled because G. Dub and the White Collar Criminals saw fit to encourage companies to ship their information technology (IT for those in the know...) jobs over to India. I just want a good clean election, none of this sucker punching like in 2000 and 2002.

Well, like the lady said, "It's good practice for November." I guess she was right.