McCOMB - Members of the McComb Rotary Club had an opportunity last week to try out the new touch-screen voting machines most of Mississippi's counties will put into use this year.
It's a practice I suspect will be repeated at other civic clubs throughout the state, as circuit clerks, like our own Roger Graves, election commissioners and representatives of the Secretary of State's Office seek to assure voters that it's simple and easy to use the new machines.
They are easy, and presumably will provide completely accurate results in tabulating votes. No hanging chads or questions about which block you marked.
That's not to say there won't be inevitable controversies surrounding elections of the future.
It isn't far-fetched to anticipate that someone will come up with the allegation that a machine is rigged or that there is some other inappropriate practice in a future election.
But it seems to me the new voting machines, a result of the 2002 Help America Vote Act, are a vast improvement.
Another byproduct of the act probably will do more than the voting machines to clean up Mississippi elections. That's a statewide computer database of registered voters maintained by the Secretary of State's Office. Linked to circuit clerks, who are the county voter registrars throughout the state, the database will result in more up-to-date voter lists.
It's going to be less likely in the future that a person will be registered and able to vote in more than one jurisdiction or that someone can vote a dead person's ballot. Secretary of State Eric Clark has predicted that "in a year or two, we're going to have" the cleanest and most accurate elections in the history of the state.
Before trying out the new voting machines, Rotarians asked a plethora of questions about the new procedure.
One question was especially thought-provoking. "If you can't read or write, can you still vote?" someone asked.
Of course you can. The machines are so user- friendly that it doesn't take much education or computer skills to use one.
A few of them will even be voice-activated for the benefit of the blind and those with other handicaps. And there can still be individual voter assistance for certain people deemed unable to cast a ballot on their own.
However, voter assistance - where one person assists another in casting a ballot - can lend itself to the possibility of fraud, and Graves says it is hoped the user-friendly machines will discourage the practice.
A better question, perhaps, is should people with no physical handicaps who don't have the ability to read and write be able to vote?
My opinion is they shouldn't, but my opinion on the subject isn't going to change anything.
There was a time, of course, when this state did have literacy tests for voter registration.
Those tests were abused so much to disqualify black people from voting that they were outlawed, as they should have been.
Had they been applied fairly, they would have been a good thing then and now. But they were not, and they are still in such disrepute that they never will be re-enacted.
About the only solution I see to illiterates voting - if it is a problem - is to eliminate illiteracy.
There is no excuse for a child with a sound mind not being taught to read these days.
