A year or so ago I lauded the Utah County DMV as "the friendliest and most efficient arm of government I regularly come into contact with." My brother suggested I try registering my car online next time. Well, I did, and talk about quick and easy! Utah does a dang good job at this type of thing. If you want to make government truly efficient, make it small, fast, simple, and local. My election day message.

Oh, I voted on one of those evil Diebold machines. Very nice, actually. For philosophical, psychological and scientific purposes, though, I'd like it to print out a human-readable, machine-scannable ballot that could be statistically sampled against the end results as a matter of course, and rescanned in the case of a recount. Dropping a ballot into a box is much more satisfying than just pressing a touch screen.

Labels: politics, technology, utah