The perfect solution for New Jersey voting

I want to start this off by saying that I had a very pleasant experience casting my votes today in Roosevelt where they reward your experience with not only a sticker but a cookie as well. No cookies were given in Mercer County, however.

Only in New Jersey could we make voting scarier than Halloween. I woke up this morning with a text telling me that the voting machines were down in Mercer County. From Mercer County spokeswoman Julie Willmont to NJ1015.com.

"We are asking poll workers to use the official ballots because they can still vote them manually, and place them in the slot in the scanning machines and we will count them manually," Mercer County spokeswoman Julie Wilmont told New Jersey 101.5. "We have Dominion and other IT professionals coming down to fix the problem. No voter should walk away."

Meanwhile, also from the article, "Voters in Hamilton and a source involved with the county voting process were told that the ink used to print the ballots could not be read by the scanner."

You ask yourself, How can this be? The polling people only had one job: make sure the polls work so that you can vote. Do they not test this stuff out beforehand? Why in 2022 are we still using paper ballots? Isn't there a better way? You bet there is and it's called online voting.

I'm a member of the Screen Actors Guild and as a member, I get to vote on the SAG Awards. Each year, I'm sent the nominated movies and a deadline for me to vote online. I simply go on the website, put in my pin number that is sent to me, and vote away.

Why can't this be done for political elections? I went online to research this question and found a site called electionbuddy.com, which handles elections in all kinds of businesses, schools, and religious organizations. So it is being done.

Someone on Reddit asks, "If we can bank online why can't we vote online?" They say anonymity. I say surely if they tried hard enough, they could come up with software to protect your anonymity, maybe they could ask ElectionBuddy.

We've come too far as people and we have too much technology at our disposal to still be relying on voting machines and paper ballots. If you still want to have them fine, but at least have online voting included as an option.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Steve Trevelise only. Follow him on Twitter @realstevetrev.