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“Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

I could not help thinking of this line from a Thomas Gray poem when I read the top headline on page one of the New York Times Monday. “Influx of voters expected to test new technology,” the headline read. And what was the new technology? Optical scanners in the polling stations. Hey, why is this a new technology? Optical scanners have been around for a few decades, and Gainesville has been using them on election day for a dozen years. But according to the New York Times, voters in at least 11 states will be using this system for the first time in November.

Now up here in the north, we are supposed to be the yokel, backwater part of the state of Florida. We chose optical scanners and South Florida chose touch-screen voting machines. One has to consider the logic in these two choices. With optical scanners, a county has to invest in small, folding tables, paper ballots, felt-tipped pens and a small scanner in each precinct – all very inexpensive. For an election in which a large turn-out is expected, you just have to set up more of the little folding tables.

With touch-screen voting machines, you have to install something akin to a portable computer at each voting station. With each one, there is either no paper trail or a poor paper trail. Each machine must be reprogrammed for every election. For a larger expected turnout of voters, you have to have more of the costly machines. The cost can range from five hundred dollars to six thousand dollars at each voting booth, not counting the cost of computer programmers. Broward County bought 6,000 of the touch-screen machines, and Palm Beach County bought 4,500. Many first-time voters need a tutorial before they can operate the electronic voting machines. If several of the machines in a precinct break down, as they often do, the lines waiting to vote get longer.

So given these choices, why would anyone in their right minds choose electronic voting machines over optical scanners? Well, helped along by lobbyists for the electronic voting machine companies, 15 of Florida’s 67 counties, serving 51 percent of Florida’s 10.4 million registered voters, did make that choice. This elite group included Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties. Now, by edict of the Legislature, they will have to change over to optical scanners. This small error in judgment by those who chose touch-screen machines will cost twenty-eight million dollars to correct. Most of it will be paid by the federal government.

Now that we are all using optical scanners, the only thing that can go wrong is not printing enough paper ballots. And what do you want to bet that doesn’t happen with some of our smarter citizens in South Florida running the show?

This is Radio Ralph with a comment at midweek for AM850.