[FartinMowler]

My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our
election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are
crazy, and they are right.

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal
elections, two barely-paid representatives of each party, known as
"scrutineers," are present all day at the voting place. If there are
more political parties, there are more scrutineers. To vote, you write
an "X" with a pencil in a one centimeter circle beside the candidate's
name, fold the ballot up and stuff it into a box. Later, the
scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit at a table for
about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally for each
candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the results
are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it again.
Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by technology. The
population of Canada is about the same as California, so the elections
are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal election the
entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us 30 days or
more?