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Imperfect system but worth a vote
By Heber Taylor
The Daily News
Published November 5, 2009
On Tuesday, the election system in Galveston County got better. It didn’t become perfect.
The new super precinct system, which got a test Tuesday, had 40 polling places.
Regardless of the voting precinct you lived in, the electronic system would give you the correct ballot, regardless of where you dropped in to vote.
The advantage of the system is that a person who lives in one city but works in another could vote at a polling place near work.
Or perhaps at a poll near a child’s school in between home and work.
As with any new system, there were some problems.
Some people who tried to vote on their way to work Tuesday morning couldn’t.
For a while, the state’s database on registered voters was down.
Election workers in Galveston County couldn’t verify voter information.
Election workers at public school buildings in Galveston had troubled when the school district’s firewalls — software designed to restrict Internet access — interfered with access to the county’s central voting system.
The same problem occurred at a couple of polls in League City.
There were other glitches, including one that caused some agonizing moments for candidates.
The system began reporting that 100 percent of the vote had been counted when, in fact, fewer than half the votes were in.
Despite those problems, the county ought to continue to invest in this system and work out the bugs.
It should be the system by which the county conducts all elections, not just those in which light turnouts are expected.
There’s a quaint notion that the best way to conduct elections is just the way grandfather did it — with paper ballots and a polling place on every corner.
The notion is that it’s somehow more accurate to have people counting ballots by hand, maybe for several days.
Under the same logic, we’d forget about automatic teller machines and Internet banking and return to the days of bank clerks with quill pens and green eyeshades.
The system wasn’t perfect Tuesday night. But it was a step in the right direction.
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