The election's long gone but the shrub lingers on

Trolling my list of refering sites I came across this well compiled collection of information about the 2000 Florida elections. In the wake of recent published flawys in computerized voting systems, its good to remember just how bad our manual systems were, and in many case still are. Worse still are the people who set them up and administer them.

I'm not saying that digital systems are inherently better than manual systems, it is clear they are currnetly wide open to fraud. However, it seems that someone could apply at least some brainpower to using a computerized front-end to present the voting information, collect the input, and then generate at paper trail that is verifiable by the voter. Is that really so hard?

My improvement to the process is that voters should be able to get a voting receipt that can be used at any later date to anonymously retrieve and confirm their voting selection and that is was counted correctly. Obviously this could not be done over the internet, only at secure terminal where only one person could see the voting preference. Verification of voting could be done by sampling voters, bringing them in and asking them to verify their vote. I suppose the problem then would be a certain number of people would forget how they voted, or deny that the presented vote was correct. How do you solve that? I don't know - I never said these problems were easy to solve! What is a vote anyway?

Maybe on voting day all the democrats should fly west and north and all the republicans to the south and east. No need to count the votes, just split the country in two and let everyone stay where they end up.