Voting well is the best revenge.

"I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before."
- Stephen Wright

For those who were on another planet in 2000, chads are the little bits of paper that fall out when a punch-card ballot is punched. They are like a negative of a vote, what was removed to make the vote readable. And in the Florida presidential balloting, they took on a personality of their own: hanging, pregnant, always feisty and controversial.

The 2004 elections in Florida may be different. Fifteen counties now have direct recording electronic voting machines, which have created controversies of their own. So chads may have had their fifteen minutes in the spotlight, but we shall see.

There are plenty of other issues that may come to a boil in the Florida voting this year. I'll be flying to Fort Lauderdale on Thursday, October 28, and prowling around South Florida. I hope particularly to spend some time talking to people in immigrant communities, African-American communities, farmworker communities, ex-felons who can't vote, people whose name sounds like an ex-felon's who can't vote, preachers, hucksters, con artists, demagogues and holy rollers of all political persuasions.

I'm stringing for Inter Press Service, a newswire based in Rome that focuses on the global South and development issues. The rest of the world is watching our elections intently, and there is at least as much at stake for them as there is for us.

My first story, "Electronic Voting No Quick Fix," was posted on the IPS web site yesterday at:
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26016