A recent piece on National Public Radio discussed the perils of electronic voting machines. It turns out that when a voting system totally lacks any back-up paper ballot such a system leaves no actual means of authenticating voting results.

This is serious stuff folks. It's on the level of an insider threat to a democracy.

The radio program turned out to be a chilling discussion of how monumental the scale of glitches and the scope of fraud that can occur with strict electronic voting. It made the famous butterfly ballot and hanging chads problems in Florida's famous voting mess sound like mere goofs and gaffs compared to absolute electronic voting.

At the end of the radio program the frustrated sounding host asked the expert being interviewed what voting system was the best. The answer he gave described a hybrid system with an actual paper ballot that is counted electronically. The voting system described as the best was the voting system we use right here in Carroll County.

I thought back to the days when the Carroll County Election Board was trying to sell the County Council on our current voting machines. Back then I covered the Council and the Commissioners for this paper. I recall well that the voting machine purchase represented both a lot of money and a hard sell.

And so... a belated round of applause and thanks to those on the Election Board back then who did the homework and research to get us our easy to use and easy to verify voting system now considered the very best in the business of voting. The public face of that campaign and the person arguing for the system was Beth Myer. I remember her persistence and her persuasion in the face of a lot of skepticism over the cost. In retrospect...a job VERY well done.

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Speaking of voting...

The National voter turnout hit a 40-year low this September when extremely small numbers of registered voters headed to the polls to decide the various primary contests. Experts are divided about what this trend portends for the November election or what it says about the American electorate in general.

I'll offer one take.

The level of Congresses' pandering of the electorate is making a mockery of the process.

I don't care for politics much. I do believe that special interests and big money have way too much influence and that the big picture, the greater good, is often compromised. That being said, corruption and influence buying and both the art and awful of politics all go back centuries. There's not much new under the sun when it comes to politics - it doesn't pay to get too worked up about this stuff.

But what happens when we reach the point where absolutely nothing can be expected of the citizenry? Where are we when government promises to make everything better, even though the promise is empty, laughable even?

The Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act of 2006 passed on a vote of 349-24.

Three hundred forty-nine members of Congress looked the voters in the eye and seeing a sea of pet owners, they blinked. They couldn't speak the truth: "Fido is your concern."

They couldn't state the obvious: "We can't even rescue all the people, let alone Fluffy."

Instead, they cast their vote to yet another promise that said they'd make everything ok.

Reacting to passage of the PETS bill, Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle summed up a view of the fictional altered universe that congressional pandering produces.

"Americans will never again be forced to leave their best friends behind to face imminent danger." Wow, with a stroke of a pen, Fluffy and Fido are safe forever.

Then again, thousands of years after he took them two-by-two, Noah still gets great free press for his evacuation efforts back in the Old Testament. Who am I to doubt the miracle powers of Uncle Sam?