Many, perhaps most of the voting devices and vote-counting devices now in use are MECHANICAL. Thus, much of our REPUBLIC'S VOTING PROCESS has roots in the 12th Century, when European monks launched THE MECHANICAL INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. And the PROTOTYPES of our VOTING PROCESS are on Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

(The Amish reject the benefits of The Thermodynamic Industrial Revolution, circa 1776, as well as those of The Electrical Industrial Revolution, circa 1889, and The Electronic Industrial Revolution, circa 1920. (An excellent portrayal of this, as it has survived into our times, is given in the 1985 movie, The Witness, directed by Peter Weir, with Harrison Ford hiding among the Amish and Kelly McGillis as an Amish widow. In one scene, Harrison Ford dresses up in the clothes of Kelley's deceased husband and asks, "Do I look Amish?"She replies, Ÿou look plain", Amish jargon, meaning the same thing.)

The problem is that most machines wear-down rather easily and slump into a biased performance, deviating from the original purpose. This is particularly true of he punch-ard accounting technology, circa 1954. I've had extensive experience with it.

In 1950, while an undergraduate in Physics at Columbia University, I took a course in Computing using these devices at Watson Laboratory, run by IBM and Columbia U. Later, in Graduate School, majoring in mathematics and statistics, at New York University, I worked by day at a firm one block from Wall Street which developed insurance porfolios for businesses, unions, and other orangizations, using punch-card technology. Still later, as Head of the Mathematics Department of Inter American University of Puero Rico, San Germáan, P. R., I trained students in computing and worked in the University Computing Department.

My experience agrees with a report given on a Network program in the post-2000 election period. The story cited a test wherein 5 punch cards were run 3 times through a counting machine WITH THREE DIFFERENT COUNTS. And the story also cited an election "two years ago in Connecticut" wherein a handcount of ballots disclosed 22% error in machine count of ballots.

The Dec 4, 2000, Time Magazine quotes a developer of the Votamatic machine, used for counting in many Florida elections, as saying that "his imperfect machine is more likely to produce dimpled chads in the vote for President than for other offices,because that column get clogged by getting the most use and therefore harder to punch out cleanly as the day goes on". Immediately after this citation, in speaking of the "undervote" wherein a voter seems not to have voted for an candidate for an office, Time says a Yale U. statistician "pointed out that the undervote in counties that used punch cards was five times as high as that in counties that used other methods".

Thus, a big proportion of American voters seemed to be kept "Amish" or "plain". Is that it? Candidly, I think the overriding reason is that -- like Fred Mertz in the TV show, "I Love Lucy" -- our leaders are CHEAP! The mechanical machine does not replace handcounting because it's more efficient, but because it's CHEAPER -- costs less "per vote" -- significaanlty less per vote than the very accurate OPTICAL READER of ballots. Thus, our sacred Voting Rights, which help keep this Republic going, is put up to the "lowest bidder"!

It's up to all of you. Is the Voting Process to be made a FIXED GAME? Are your Voting Rights to become a CRUEL JOKE? And are you satisfied that the Media do not see this as the Century's most important story?