In computer news this week:

Lead: Technology destroys more social customs - automated mail-in voting

In recalling the confusion of the last presidential elections - with the hanging chad cards - many municipalities seem to have vowed to avoid such incidents in the future.

For most of the years I've voted I would go to my voting place, be handed a ballot by the voting registrar; go into a voting booth and use that little punch thing to vote my preferences. Then I'd come out of the voting booth and put my ballot in the ballot box. I'd exchange small talk with the election board workers, and maybe say Hi to someone I knew standing in line to vote. Having worked on an election board, I knew that at the end of the day all the ballots were taken to the courthouse and tabulated by computer.

When I moved to the tiny town of Spangle 4 years ago, I found that voting was a social gathering, similar to a picnic or festival. Everyone voted at the local fire station, and people would stand around outside dressed in their good clothes, with their children, laughing and exchanging gossip and news, and sometimes you had to park a couple blocks away .

The next time I voted, after the hanging chad incident, they had changed the ballots. No more punch ballots; now it was the large sheet of paper, and you were handed kind of a black crayon, and told to carefully fill in the oblong blanks next to your choice. Then you were led to what looked like a giant copy machine, and instructed to insert your ballot in this thing, and it would automatically audit and tabulate your vote. It was all done by computer now without having to take the ballots to town. Then you went outside and talked to people.

But then someone in election central decided this was not an efficient way for a small town with less than 200 registered voters to vote, so it was decided - without any local persons' input - that all voting would be done by mail.

So this election everyone received a voting envelope in the mail; and complicated instructions on what kind of a pen to use to fill in the oblong blanks next to your choice; where to go in Spokane to get another ballot in the event you were sloppy or made a lot of mistakes, and how to sign, seal, and deliver this ballot to the local post office, and don't forget to put a stamp on it. No helpful voting registrars, no information related to the candidates or issues like there used to be at the old voting place.

And so everyone voted this way for the first time. As some say, paid to vote for the first time with that 37 cent stamp. And the ballots came out weeks before the election, and most people filled them and mailed them right away, and then had to wait weeks for the rest of the people to vote normally at polling places on Election day.

Then I watched on tv people voting normally at polling places, with tv reporters covering exit polls, and tv stations doing projections of winners, and there was an air of excitement and involvement. But there was no sense of excitement or suspense for me. I knew that for us everything had been decided weeks ago, tabulated and totaled, and there was little if any election excitement. Then a few minutes after 8 pm, the state released the results of our mail-in balloting online, and everything was all over. I'm sure the majority of people here just checked the tv results, and eventually they got around to us, on kind of a hit or miss basis.

An efficient computerized process. No human socialization at all. Why do I feel cheated?

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230