Demagogue

Will Election 2006 be one great, big technological train wreck? Such fears are raised by various reports, such as this one from ABC News:

Come Tuesday, more than 80 percent of American voters will use electronic voting machines to cast their ballot in the Nov. 7 midterm elections. One-third of those precincts will be using the technology for the first time.

If the primaries and test runs of the machines are to be any indication, Election Day could be teetering on the edge of disaster.

"I think it's going to be a train wreck," said Freddie Oakley, an election supervisor near Sacramento, Calif.

Oakley was stunned when she tested her county's new electronic voting machines and the audio instructions for the visually impaired came out in Vietnamese.

"Vietnamese is a great language, very beautiful and musical," Oakley said, "But we are not persuaded that we have a ton of Vietnamese-speaking blind voters."