Is the Voting System Broken?

Because of the spat of ACORN stories we are getting about tampering with the vote I am reprinting a letter published in Long Island Newsday, Dec 7, 2000.

Is the Voting System Broken?

Knowing what we now know about chads, dimples, undervotes, overvotes, absentee ballots and voting machines, will we ever be able to trust the result of any future election?

Any watchful person following this story now knows that millions of votes go uncounted in every election. Millions more votes are disqualified. It happens in every voting precinct and in every election throughout the United States in every race.

If Vice President Al Gore and his supporters are right, then why should any American believe the results of any election? Will all future American elections be decided by lawyers when the races are close?

What has made American elections work since the founding of the country is the belief that the people who manage them are for the most part honest, hard-working and fair. Yes, there is the occasional scandal, but overall the results have been trustworthy-or have they?

And isn't that really the question we must now ask ourselves? Because if our elections are a fraud, then the voting franchise is also a fraud. Without the freedom to vote and have it counted honestly with the same rules for everybody, there is no franchise and without it there can be no America-at least not in the way the founders envisioned it