A THIRD WORLD ELECTION

The tumult and the shouting are over, thank God, and the people have spoken. It was close but not so much as I expected. I believe the right man won. But the expense and the time, the slime and dirty tricks for both parties were disgusting.

On our little island in Florida, my wife and I, along with many others, stood and waited in line for three hours and forty minutes. We actually got in the ballot room in a little more than three hours, quickly voted (though the ballot, with a ton of proposed amendments in bilingual form looked like the next great American novel) and then stood in line again so that we could scan our multi-paged ballot one page at a time THROUGH ONE BALLOT MACHINE/SCANNER. You don't have to be a brilliant mathmetician to figure, at five sheets per person, waiting for each page to be cleared, which took over a minute, that the pace was turtlelike. Judging by the quantity of letters to the editor of the local Fort Myers newspaper, this problem was universal, and people were pissed, to say the least.

Standing in line that long you make a lot of temporary friendships, forged in the adversity of shared discomfort (we had lots of rain showers). . One attractive younger woman in front of me received a phone call from an American friend living in Switzerland who said, "When is America going to join the twenty-first cenrury in voting procedures? Why are we so backward?"

It is shambolic, this whole system of voting. Here we are leading the world in technology and we can't come up with an internet voting system. I know, I know, the security problems. But we trust our defense system and a host of other governmental activities to computers; yes, they get breached on occasions, but we usually sort it out. Can't we put some brainpower to work to solve this ridiculous system which is a blackmark on the democratic process.

Then we have the problem of manipulation of voters. Here in Florida the Republican powers have done everything possible to limit voters, especially those they don't want to vote, like blacks, who are frequently overwhelmingly Democratic, by limiting voting hours in early voting or demanding ridiculous proofs of identity as a valid voter. Shades of pre-Civil Rights Mississippi...

I get tired of the number one nation in the world (at least for now) looking like a third world country at election time. It's time, long overdue, for a real change in election procedures.