Phil Again wrote:
As most who visit this newsgroup are tool users, I ask for a
sympathetic reading. Just a minor soap box rant for the old days.

My local municipality has just plain junk voting equipment; plastic,
plastic, and cheap. No class, no flair, no nothing. As much as I
rail against the Style .VS. Substance cultural wars, there is
something to be said for marketing flair and elaborated protocol when
it comes to civic duty.

I am old enough to remember the mechanical lever voting booths.

Ah, the old Shoup Voting Machine. It went the way of the paper ballot in
that elections are just too complicated to be accommodated by the
capabilities.

In my county, there must be 1500 people running for this and that -
everything from President down to Judge Court of Domestic Relations #27.
We've got 8 Justice of the Peace precincts, 5 congressional districts, 7
state house and 3 senate districts. 20-odd city governments with all their
council seats, sheriff, 8 constables, god-knows-how-many judgeships,
municipal utility districts, blah-blah-blah. All with overlapping
boundaries. In all, there are probably 500 DIFFERENT ballots for my county
alone.

When I was going to college, we used Shoup voting machines for a student
election (the county was glad to furnish them under the rubric of
'education'). Turns out, the machine couldn't handle one permutation. The
college rules stated that the top four candidates won the office for the
Student Senate and each student could vote for two. This combination was
impossible for the Shoup.