A Better Way To Vote?
While there may never be a consensus on who really won the presidential election this year, there does seem to be agreement that something should be done to fix the way we elect a president and cast our votes.
CBS News Correspondent Thalia Assuras reports that Florida is making an effort to change their chad-counting ways.
On Thursday, Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president-elect, named a special panel to sort out Florida's election troubles and make recommendations for the state legislature to correct the problems.
"Numerous concerns were raised about the integrity of Florida's elections process," said Bush, who signed an executive order creating the 21-person Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards and Technology.
The governor also said he supported the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights plan to investigate alleged voting irregularities at hearings Jan. 11 and 12 in Tallahassee.
He ordered the new task force to start its business by Jan. 3. It will make its recommendations by March 1.
Bush turned to one-time political adversary Jim Smith, a former attorney general and secretary of state, and University of Miami President Tad Foote to head the group.
Smith, who ran against Bush for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1994, was a Democrat until 1986. Foote, who is retiring June 1 after 20 years leading the Coral Gables private school, is a Democrat.
The panel is made up of 10 Republicans, 10 Democrats and an attorney with no party affiliation. It includes two county elections supervisors, and four legislators.
"With its help we will ensure the fairness of the system," said Bush, flanked by House Minority Leader Lois Frankel, a Democrat, and Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
"If there ever has been a matter that cries out for bipartisan attention, this is one," Frankel said. "This is something we have to do."
And it seems Florida is not alone. Several other states are hoping to prevent a similar fiasco.
Nationwide, one in three voters uses those infamous punch cards, another 20 percent use lever machines based on an 1892 design and almost four million Americans still fill out paper ballots. The result of using these outdated voting systems is that about two million ballots are thrown out.
Many believe the logical solution, although pricey, is high-tech.
Touch screens are one option. Used by one-tenth of the nation's voters, they offer simplicity - but they cost about $7,000 per unit.
A cheaper solution is Internet voting, which has an added bonus: A voter would be able to stop for a moment and get a little more information about a candidate online to answer last-minute questions.
But Internet voting may not be the only option. Some scientists are already mulling over the possibilities.
On Thursday, two of the nation's leading scientific institutions announced a joint effort to develop an easy, rliable and inexpensive voting system.
"To a large extent, the problem that the country has faced these last few weeks has a technological solution," said Charles Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Experts from MIT and the California Institute of Technology said they would conduct a thorough examination of existing voting technology and then try to develop improvements.
"We are going to consider technology from the oldest to the newest, from paper ballots, like people used in the 19th century, to Internet voting," MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere said.
The two universities are responsible for a staggering percentage of the world's cutting edge technology.
The plan began to take shape a few weeks after Election Day, when CalTech President David Baltimore called Vest to gripe about the confusion in Florida.
They agreed something had to be done, and that their schools had the resources to do it. So, they organized a team of political scientists, engineers and design experts to undertake the study.
"It is embarrassing to America when technology fails and it puts democracy to such a test as we have seen in the last month," Baltimore said Thursday from Pasadena, Calif., during a joint-video news conference with Vest.
But major changes could cost billions of dollars to install and maintain; some members of Congress have already proposed more funding for elections.
"In the wake of the national turmoil of recent weeks, the MIT-CalTech initiative applies technical expertise to address mechanical flaws in the voting process, which would go a long way toward restoring public confidence in the integrity of the overall electoral system," Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., said.