The New York Times reports Democratic leaders in the House & Senate are slowing their push for voting machine reform.

Under pressure from state and local officials, as well as from lobbyists for the disabled, House leaders now advocate putting off the most sweeping changes until 2012, four years later than planned.

Overhauling voting systems before next year’s presidential election had once been a top Democratic priority, primarily to allow greater accountability and be certain that all votes registered on computerized touch-screen systems were counted. But state and local elections officials told Congress they could not make the changes in time for the balloting in November 2008, particularly in light of the extra workload involved in preparing for next year’s much-earlier presidential primary season.

I have to say imho that this is a pretty big sham. We are coming up on eight years since the voting problems of November 1999. Knowing that every person who is eligible can vote and that their votes are counted should pretty much be priority #1 in a democracy. The Democrats have been calling for this reform since November 99 and now that they are in power they seem ready and willing to just toss it off.

In a democracy there should be no time, energy or technological excuse for something that the nation thought was worked out in the late 1700’s and is vital to our entire way of life. It might not make us all happy because it isn’t the tech happy, instant gratification system everyone wants BUT if we cannot get this worked out we should simply go back to a paper system (or perhaps the basic Voter machine system we have here in NYS) and have people mark off their choice and then have secured lock boxes those ballots fall into.

This is pretty darn ridiculous.