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I've just returned from "voting," and I have to say, I need a shower.

I used to love going down to my town hall and scrawling with pencil on a piece of paper, carefully folding it and pushing it into the boxes before the assembled matriarchs of Moretown. It was the main thing that gave me hope for the future of Vermont's governance, frankly. I knew I could absolutely depend on members of my own community to count the votes honorably. It's bad enough the new town clerk wants us to vote in the Moretown Elementary School, out of parking and "safety concerns," despite the venerable town hall's 150 years of historical service & significance, but imagine my surprise when I was handed what was obviously an optical scan form. "There was a vote," she told me, though I never heard about it, "...and we voted to stop counting paper ballots by hand."

The irony is overwhelming.

So now, in no uncertain terms, I understand what she meant when she casually mentioned several months ago that she was going to "bring us into the 21st Century." When I informed my town clerk that the optical scanners were among some of the worst in terms of exit polling and recount disparities she insisted that was "...only Diebold, and this is an LHS machine." LHS was implicated in serious anomalies as recent as the last New Hampshire Primary. She didn't seem to understand that LHS only programs machines and that Diebold changed their name to "Premier Election Systems," in full understanding that no one trusts them. I looked for a name on the machine and didn't even see one, a curious fact in itself.

Sure enough, a quick image search confirms that the machine in question was a Diebold optical scanner.

I wish I hadn't voted at all now, and I will never again allow my vote to be counted on an electronic black box.