Throughout a story today from the NYTimes, officials from Ohio are quoted as blaming voting problems on both government employee typos and "computer errors." I find this funny, because computers generally don't have ANY "errors", rather they have programming errors which ties back directly to the person, people, or companies that programmed the computer. Given that our great state of Ohio has chosen to use horrendously designed and programmed Diebold voting machines and tabulation databases, I don't think it would be a stretch to blame these supposed "computer errors" on further poor government decision-making and expertise of those building the databases which our voter registrations are being checked against.

What's perhaps a bit more disturbing about this saga is that once again technology is being used as the scapegoat for people's mistakes. Guns are useful tools in very specific circumstances, but due to the bad uses and risks associated with this technology many people have chosen to demonize the technology instead of deal with the people who used the technology incorrectly. Now we have people complaining against the "stealing" of online music, "computer glitches" in voting machines, and "hackers" abusing the Internet instead of collectively confronting and defeating the evils of our world. (to borrow a recent Sen. McCain phrase)