Your Elected Officials in Action

It was tough to sit through yesterday's Committee meetings of Northampton County Council. In fact, after over two hours of nonsense, I got up and left. There were numerous questions about the Express Vote XL Voting machines recommended by a vast majority of election judges, the Elections Commission and the Lamont McClure administration. Most came from a point of absolute ignorance.

Council member Tara Zrinski, who walked in about an hour after the meeting had started, had baseless concerns that she said she read in some article she never identified.

But the most idiotic questions came from outgoing (thankfully) Council member Bob Werner. His wife is running to take his seat, though I've never seen her at a Council meeting.

What Werner did is mention another unidentified article about a voting machine that was purchased by some retiret member of Homeland Security or the KGB or something. According to Werner, this tecchie reverse engineered the machine and was able yo retrieve voting data.

His illogical argument is that if one voting machine is bad, it necessarily follows that they all are.

This is what we call a fallacy in logic class.

It was only toward the end of his questioning that Werner revealed that the machine in question is not the machine being considered by Council.

Council member Kevin Lott nearly fell out of his seat when Werner made that revelation.

In addition to faulty logic, Werner demanded that Administrator Charles Dertinger tell him whether the state could come along in the future and demand a different machine. He wanted a guarantee this would never happen.

How the hell can a county employee guarantee what the state will or won't do?

They were stupid questions about a good system that has been certified by the federal and state government. Werner at one point said the certification process was halted, but as it turns out, that was with a different system, too.

These are your elected representatives folks.