By Roger M. Pang

This morning my wife and I walked to the local church to vote. Two years ago we voted on tablet like machines and prior to that it was paper ballots. This year we took 50 steps back because  there was a shortage of machines, so we voted on paper ballots again.  Above is a scan of my receipt.

Even in my hometown in New Jersey we always had polling machines, and when I lived in New York City we had voting machines.

I remember going into the booths with my parents over 30 years ago and we had machines to tabulate our votes.

Today when we voted, we told them our name and address. They did not even ask for ID. They gave us a tabloid sheet of paper with the candidates and propositions and we had to connect the arrows. After we were done voting we were asked to put our ballot in a large folder, and give it to the man behind the boxes. He then held it over the ballot box and released the ballot into the box.

How do I know if my vote ended up in the dumpster? Since they didn’t check my ID, I could have went and voted for my neighbor. Sorry Sen. Obama, your vote is in the dumpster.

I would also like to mention that there is a voting center a couple of blocks from my house that is in someone’s garage.

Wouldn’t you think the land of technology, Google, HP, E-Bay and Yahoo (maybe soon to be MS-hoo) would be able to create a secure innovative way to vote or at least have some automated process? Can we make civic duty easier or virtual?

Maybe like the Google Lunar X PRIZE, one of these companies could put up some cash to innovate the election process.

Heck with all of the money the candidates spend on advertising, they should take a percentage of that and spend it on voting technology. Make voting green, stop killing trees and no more chads!