New Mexico is one of 17 states that allows in-person early voting. In fact, the polls opened here on October 7, and remain open until November 1. The only problem with voting early is that I still have to put up with those annoying political ads on TV for 2 more weeks. I think they ought to have a ‘P’ chip in TV’s. You know how new TV’s come with the so-called ‘V’ chip that is supposed to allow parents to restrict their children’s TV viewing? Well, I propose a ‘P ‘chip. Once activated, it will block out all annoying political advertisements. Of course if that happened, then it would just open the door to a host of other chips. How about the ‘D’ chip that would block those scary drug ads. Anyway, I digress.
I like the early voting. Here in Las Cruces, the main early voting site is at the County Administration building. The site is well set up and staffed, and they have had a steady stream of voters. In fact, the county clerk is estimating that 50% of all votes cast in Las Cruces will be cast during early voting.
New Mexico has banned the use of touch-screen voting terminals. As someone who spent their working career in IT, I have followed the debate over the computerized touch-screens closely. My experience has taught me that electronic records can be manipulated and corrupted at a very low level. It doesn’t have to be a grand scheme, or even require high level access. So I am glad that the governor took the step to ban the touch-screens. In fact, there have already been reports of irregularities in West Virginia involving touch-screen voting machines. (Link to the Charleston Gazette article.) We have paper ballots, that are read by machine. Yes, there still is potential for problems with the software that reads and tabulates the ballot, but, the original paper still exists for recount and verification purposes.
