How you're supposed to vote

Like this, not early, not registered by some paid flunky, not given a ride on a party-hired shuttle, and not illegally. For all the hoohah about wanting every vote to count, I think every vote should be a real vote, not a clone of some labor leader or ACT or the NAACP. I was raised Republican, but I've never voted a straight ticket, even when I was a Republican County Chairman.

There's an old story that in Carbon County, north of here, which was populated by many immigrant coal miners from Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy, the illiterate miners were told by the party organizers to "put the X under the chicken," which referred to the practice of printing a picture of a rooster for the Democrat slate. I don't remember what the Republican ballot symbol was. I don't object to these people voting, even if they have to have ballots in a language other than English, I just don't want them to be pawns for some ward heeler.

I like using paper ballots. We use optically scanned ballots, and while I'm sure some ballots don't get counted because people don't mark them well enough to be read, I think it's the job of the voter to make sure. I think that voters who have to be cajoled into voting are worse than non-voters.