Dear Swami do you understand the problem with voting in Lake County or am I only being too picky about getting my vote counted on time? Signed; Muddled in Mundelein.
First, our favorite statistic as found somewhere: A recent study found the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study found Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of beer a Year. That means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon.
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Here’s the standard response to any big problem: We don’t think it’s appropriate to point fingers.
This rhetorical defenses reduces criticism of all problems to some form of laughing at your friend when he snorts milk through his nose in response to your best dirty joke.
Swami is not sure why pointing fingers is a bad thing, especially if you can’t get anyone’s attention without jumping up and down, waving and pointing. Swami's mom always said pointing was bad manners, but never said why.
And, on the other hand, even if pointing is bad manners, saving someone from ridicule can be just as pointless and rude.
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Ed and Larry are in the crow’s nest of the Titanic.
Says Ed: Say, isn’t that an iceberg coming over the horizon at us?
Says Larry: Nah.
Says Ed: I’m sure of it.
Says Larry: Maybe it is, but it’s not nice to point.
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Which brings us to Lake County Clerk Willard Helander whose vote totaling operation sort of went belly up Tuesday night due to the ubiquitous and undefined “technical problems.” We smell bad modems.
This sort of thing can happen to anyone.
But it's worth noting when it happens to Helander who ran her last election on the premise that she had personally reworked all the technology in vote counting and that things were shipshape.
"We've reinvented every aspect," Helander said then, pointing to a new accessible voting system for those with special needs, Web site improvements including expanded election result features and a "Kids Zone," creation of a digital archive of voter registration records and the introduction of optical scan voting.
Then there’s the 2006 primary and this note from news reports: “While Helander said that process produced no significant flaws, there were a handful of precincts with delayed returns, including one at the Zion Leisure Center that had to truck in its ballots rather than transmit them electronically. "They had a transmission problem and had to drive them in, and the driver decided to give his co-workers a ride home on the way," Helander said.
That was was more an individual error than the entire system hiccuping, but the last thing you'd want to following around like a happy little puppy was a reputation (fair or unfair) for technical failures.
It's the clerk's job to run elections and make sure they function efficiently. Plus, no one seems quite sure what exactly happened to the election counting Tuesday night, or how to stop it from happening again.
Mass executions in the computer department don't seem like a good idea.
So Swami doesn’t want to be the one who points fingers, but gosh, isn’t that a iceberg coming at us?
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