No troubles are seen with vote machines

We wouldn't be in this mess if Florida had ordered thinner paper for its punch-card ballots six years ago.

Let me rephrase that. We'd still be in a mess. We just wouldn't know it.

And the Emery County clerk wouldn't be scrambling to come up with $40,000 because he just voided the warranty on a bunch of new electronic voting machines.

Maybe sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Or as they say in the voting business, HAVA nice day.

HAVA stands for the Help America Vote Act. That was Congress' response to the 2000 Election. It didn't go as far as to mandate that states turn to electronic voting devices, but it did impose enough regulations that states had little choice.

Washington is good at that. No one there will tell you exactly where to go. They'll just nudge you there with all the subtlety of a bumper car at an amusement park.

But, OK. Why not bring voting into the 21st century? Why hang onto a system that is mildly flawed, even if most people don't know it?

Why schedule a root canal if you don't really need one?

Here's democracy's nasty little secret: No one has yet invented a foolproof voting system. Once you get beyond counting the paper ballots of about 10 people, errors begin to occur with a predictable frequency.

And once states began switching to electronic voting machines, debates over accuracy, computer programs, independent verification and the ability to tamper with the system began to spread like Mormon crickets on a June day in the west desert. Maryland's House just voted 137-0 to back away from its paperless Diebold voting machines this year and use paper ballots and an optical scan system instead.

When was the last time you heard of a legislature doing anything unanimously?

But Diebold isn't the only system causing doubts. Sequoia and ES&S also have had problems in various parts of the country.

So it's understandable why Emery County Clerk-Auditor Bruce Funk was worried enough, when he thought he saw some problems, to get an independent group to examine the Diebold machines his county was getting ready to use. Utah's lieutenant governor's office contracted with Diebold to handle the state's ballots (complete with paper receipts, unlike in Maryland).