Page 5 - Issue 9

Kadima officials dismissed the criticism about poor organization the next morning by essentially saying,
"Hey, stuff happens."

The same argument was used last week when Labor was forced to postpone its primaries by two days
because of a breakdown in a state-of-the-art computer system that was supposed to make voting much
easier, quicker and more efficient.

And the same line will most likely be used on Tuesday by Likud representatives who will be forced to
explain to the public why thousands of people stood in the cold for hours outside polling places, like so
many Soviet citizens waiting during the Brezhnev years for the rare fresh fruits and vegetables outside a
Moscow "supermarket."

True, mistakes happen. They happen once, even twice. But when the same mistake happens a third
time, it's time to get worried.

How difficult is it to conduct a primary? We're not talking here about enormous numbers. It's not as if this
was the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania where millions of people went to the polls. Some 40,000
people voted in the Kadima elections, about 35,000 in Labor's primaries, and maybe 50,000 in the Likud
ones.

The most troubling aspect of Monday's mess-up is that the Likud, after seeing what happened in the
Labor primary last week, should have been prepared. It should have drawn conclusions, maybe had
some manual ballots printed up and stored out back just in case. It's called learning from mistakes.

That the Likud was woefully unprepared for possible technological hitches shows some of our less-than-
adorable national characteristics.

First of all, there is an over-reliance on bells and whistles, an obsession with the technological upgrade.
Manual ballots have served man fairly effectively since the time of Thomas Jefferson; there is no need to
move to an unproven computer system just because it's available. Newer and niftier does not always
mean better.

Secondly, we have no patience. The headlong rush to change the old manual ballot for the computer
was motivated, it seems, by a need to get instant results - to know who won within the hour, something
that would have been the case had any of those computer systems actually worked.

But why the rush? So we would have known the results at midnight instead of at 2 a.m. Would that really
have made a difference? Could the nation not have controlled its curiosity for another two hours? How
many people were really going to stay up until midnight waiting for the results anyway?

And finally - and the most troubling - Monday's foul-up shows a great deal of arrogance. Only the
arrogant would look at a computer-system collapse that completely messed up a similar election last
week and say to themselves, "No, that can't happen to me; it won't happen to me; I don't need to
prepare differently; everything will be okay."

It can happen, it will happen, there is a tremendous need to prepare and - sans preparation and
contingency plans - everything will not be okay. Life is not a Bob Marley song ("Don't worry about a
thing, 'cause every little thing gonna be all right.")

If the country takes those lessons away from what has turned into a sorry primary season, then all the
aggravation already caused by these elections will not have been in vain.