Technology continues to march on despite all of our desperate attempts to make time stand  still. I can still remember the rumblings when the voting precinct where I cast my ballot when from a paper ballot to a voting machine.

It was as if we were surrendering our own personal freedom to vote and giving it to robot overlords. With the passage of time we came to feel a lot more confident about the voting machine and its ability to handle our ballots.

Now Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler is suggesting that maybe the voting machine has become the dinosaur of election day and it's time to put it out to pasture and keep up with the times. He is suggesting that voters might be casting their votes in the very near future on electronic tablet computers such as Apple's iPad.

A $5,200 voting machine at the current cost versus $1,500 on hardware for three iPads per precinct, so huge savings.

Schedler's comments were reported by the Louisiana Radio Network and I have to admit that is a pretty significant savings for the state.

Does Mr. Schedler see the state taking the technology leap anytime soon? If you consider 2017 to be soon then the answer would be yes. There are some barriers that will have to be overcome for the transition from voting machine to electronic tablet to become something comfortable for voters to use.

In fact the Secretary of State is suggesting that the state not even purchase iPads but instead lease them on an as needed basis.

We would probably for cost reasons and training, and I can't over emphasize the training side of this, we would probably do this on early voting with registered voters first.

It's truly a sign of the times. More and more people are becoming comfortable with the hand held electronic technology and it certainly costs less. I guess the next step would be voting from the privacy of your own home.

Did you just get a shiver up your spine too?

 

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