If The Dollar Store Can Do It...

... Why can't Indiana?

Leave it to our state government to fail to do what any retailer will do effortlessly: produce a receipt you take home with you.

Buy something completely innocuous- sweat socks, disposable diapers, any Al Franken book- and you'll get a receipt. You'll have eternal proof of how much money you spent, where you spent it, when you spent it, and what you spent it on.

Exercise the most precious right of American citizenship and vote, and you'll walk away empty handed, and unsure that your vote was definitively counted.

Was there petulant, ponderous resistance among retailers when the time came for them to install machines in their stores that would produce purchase receipts? Not among the intelligent retailers. These machines actually helped them track their inventory better, which allowed them to become more efficient while serving their customers better.

In the same way, intelligent governments should eagerly obtain the sort of voting machines that at once produce a detailed receipt for the voter and tally the votes.

Indiana's voting machines currently lag some 25 years behind the cash register at Wal-Mart. It's time to rectify that situation, and make a paper trail for votes as important as a paper trail for purchases of kitty litter.