Watch Your Dots!!!!!

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Always entertaining Los Angeles blog Superfluous Juxtaposition calls our attention to InkaVote mascot Dots, his website and his poem. Well, we're here to tell you that, adorable though he may be, Dots is a bad, bad puppy.

It's great that the County Clerk's office has spent so much time and money publicizing their mascot as a way to bring attention to their new voting system, but maybe that time and money would've been better spent investigating a system that isn't just as flawed -- if not more so -- than its predecessor. Having already voted this morning, we can barely conceal our frustration -- and anger -- at this glitchy new system. The inkers do not appear to be designed to fill the circles entirely. They leave only a tiny mark, which doesn't instill confidence that the votes will be read properly by machines or that their intention will be any clearer than that of a hanging chad should this election come to a recount.

So if the County Clerk won't tell you how to use their system, we will:

1. When making your vote, PRESS DOWN FIRMLY AND TWIST. Make sure that the circles are filled in entirely.
2. After you've inked your ballot, wait a few seconds before removing it so that the ink can dry. Smudged ballots will need to be redone. (This was one instruction we were given by poll workers).
3. Finally, check your ballot one last time against the sample ballot to ensure that the numbers corresponding to the votes you intended to make are the ones that got filled in.

To many people, especially to a population jaded by Florida 2000, these guidelines will be self-evident. But a certain number of people, from first-time voters to seniors, will surely leave the polling place with improperly-marked ballots. Given the lessons we all learned in the last Presidential election, this is simply inexcusable. Ballots and voting systems need to be designed to be foolproof, and they need to be properly explained to the public. The County Clerk and their dumb dog really blew it this time.