Now & Then

Elections, then and now

Our Pea Ridge general election day, Nov. 6, 2012, presented a sight such as I have never witnessed in all my short 72 years of life. The long waiting line of signed-in voters, waiting for a voting machine, extending throughout the community room, across the parking lot outside, and far down the drive toward Hwy. 72, was an unbelievable, astonishing, bizarre sight! We would wish we could have celebrated the great turnout of some 1,300 voters from throughout our Pea Ridge community. But the shortage of electronic voting machines, and an astonishingly inadequate supply of paper ballots, made election day a frustrating experience, a mindnumbing ordeal for both voters and poll workers.

Especially tragic was the reality that many signedin voters gave up and left the polling place without voting, because they could not wait long hours to get through the line to vote.

We hope this kind of near-disastrous election process will never happen again. In the long history of Benton County, we think there has never before been an election time in which the County Election Commission was so woefully unprepared, and so massively underestimated the turnout of voters for a general election.

As an American, a Benton Countian and a Pea Ridger, I grew up in a political climate characterized by a generally positive view of government. As we came through wartime, and as we rose out of the miseries of the Great Depression, we had a widespread, biblically-based positive respect for the government and officials of our nation, and of our state and county, believing in the American sense that our government is able to work on behalf of the well-being of the people. As President Lincoln expressed, this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Coming from those WWII days and the 1950s, when private enterprise and public initiatives seemed to be able to partner together in helping people survive hard times and labor together towarda more prosperous common life, we old-timers with roots in Northwest Arkansas have difficulty with today’s widespread negative view of government and the cynical assumptions of government ineptitude. So, we are especially dismayed when one of our county agencies, designed to serve the fundamental rights of our citizens, providing the practical means and materials for exercising our right to vote, serves up an election so ineptly planned, and is so utterly unprepared to respond to the needs of the voting precincts of the county.

Of course in the old days, we were plain low-tech.

Paper ballots and pencils provided the means of voting. After the downtown Lodge Hall was built in the late 1940s, I think Pea Ridge elections were held there for many years. The town and community was much smaller then. I’m wondering where voting took place before that building was built? Was it in the school house? I need to ask some of our older citizens about that.

Today we are high-tech in so many areas of life, including our elections.

Some people even suggest that one day voters should be able to vote using iPads or iPhones as well as computers of various sorts. My experience with high-tech equipment so far leads me to be cautious about too great reliance on such technologies. Ironically, our near-disaster on Nov. 6 was directly a consequence of high-tech malfunctions and a lack of those plain, old-fashioned, generally reliable paper ballots. I want to say that I like the electronic voting machines. They are nice to use, convenient, and they effectively allow voters to register choices. They are exceptionally helpful in vote-counting, eliminating the tedium and potential inaccuracy of hand-counting ballots. But the machines are not fast, andthey are expensive. A voter can complete a paper ballot as quickly as he or she can vote at the machine.

With paper ballots, we poll workers can set up tables, with privacy shields, making it possible for 20 or even 30 voters to be filling out their ballots at a given time, and voters can move through the polling place five to seven times as fast as is possible with four voting machines.

Over the past several years, our election officials have slowly implemented the use of electronic voting machines, apparently hoping to widen their acceptance, and pushing the voting public away from reliance on paper ballots.

Our experience of Nov. 6 illustrates the consequences of an extreme and unrealistic move toward that end.

Our election officials need to realize that for us to “accept” voting machines as the prevailing method of voting, we need at least twice as many of the machines as the county now owns, and more ideally three times as many. That will require spending quite a few public dollars. In the meantime, the business of an Election Commission is to provide materials for the practical exercise of the people’s right to vote. They are sometimes criticized for printing more paper ballots than are used. But to adequately supply voters with the means to vote, it is absolutely necessary to spend enough money to produce an adequate supply of ballots. The right to vote is fundamental to our life as citizens, more important than roads, more important than salaries. Whether we lean on electronic machines or on paper ballots, we will need to spend some taxpayer money. But the people have the right to be able to vote, and to do so in a reasonable time, and to do so with reasonable convenience.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 11/14/2012