Six years later, another Florida fiasco awaits

Voters should be outraged that the balloting system in this nation is unreliable. Six years after the fiasco in Florida, we continue to look for an answer. This vital arm of our democracy still has problems.

Human and machine problems persist. An important congressional election is weeks away, and we are still in the dark in some places.

To make matters worse, computer scientists at Princeton showed last week that they can hack into voting machines and disrupt the count. That is unacceptable.

In the Maryland primary earlier this month, there were problems in Baltimore and Montgomery County, a Washington suburb. Some workers failed to show up on time. Several precincts did not have cards to give voters the proper access.

While many precincts were ordered to stay open an extra hour, it is a certainty that some voters who had to get to work failed to come later. They were disenfranchised by stupidity.

In other states, machines were not operating properly and had to wait until technicians arrived to fix them.

What to do?

l It is too late to fix some machines. The affected precincts should go to paper ballots with a proper backup for counting purposes.

l Workers guilty of being late or failing to supply voting cards should be fired. No excuse is valid.

l States should follow the example of a few that have early voting stations to accommodate those voters who are traveling or cannot be there on Election Day.

l The world's finest democracy should move to weekend voting rather than elections on a Tuesday with limited hours. It makes too much sense. What are opponents afraid of?

We must fix this, or we are going to have another Florida.