Elections Are Like Lottery Tickets
If the store clerk says your lottery ticket was not a winner, should you just shrug and walk away? If the paperless voting machine says your campaign for office was not a winner, should you concede the election?
What’s the difference between these two events?
We now know some Canadian store clerks claimed winning lottery tickets for themselves after telling customers the tickets were worthless. That’s pretty much what happened in the election in Sarasota, Florida in 2006. Some paperless voting machines told candidate Jennings that there were not many votes on the machine for her. In fact, she probably was the real winner of the election.
Iowa’s solution is to create a better paper trail for the lottery tickets. Make customers sign their tickets before the clerk gets them. That signature prevents the clerk from claiming the winnings after mis-informing the client that the ticket was “worthless.” The clerk can’t very well turn in “his” winning ticket if it has someone else’s signature on it.
Always have a paper trail, in lotteries and in elections.