We’ve all had enough of hanging chads to last a lifetime, and this exhaustion was directly reflected in 2002 when Congress enthusiastically passed the Help America Vote Act. Every voting procedure nationwide had to have an easily-readable paper trail to support an uncontroversial manual recount. It was also accompanied by another good idea: Polling places all needed to have voting machines which could accommodate the physically-challenged.

In response, many thought that touch screens would be a perfect technology to meet a number of all-around needs, and California created its own rule that the touch screens must also have printers which can produce the vaunted and coveted paper trail.

Congress gave everyone until 2006 to get the new technology into place, and wouldn’t you know it? 2006 has arrived, and the number of federal, state and locally–approved touch-screen systems is … zero.

As all new technology takes time, this isn’t such an unexpected situation, but what is interesting is that a significant number of counties in California have asked to have a dispensation not just for touch-screen systems, but for every kind of system. They want to conduct mail-only elections in the coming June primary. That’s right. They want to mail out individual paper ballots and have them returned via the US mail. And they also want the option to do this until 2011.

Now, you might reasonably view this action as giving counties more time to work out the bugs in the new technology. Or as simply another way of delaying the pain, just like moving the test date in high school only moves the point at which you start cramming. But I think it may mean something else.

A year ago, the state of California asked for seven or eight counties to volunteer for a vote-by-mail experiment, and over three dozen came forward. In a sense, it got all these counties to thinking. It turns out that voting by mail is cheaper, it’s less prone to counting problems, it provides a built-in paper trail, and experience now shows – it turns out more voters.

Historically speaking, there’s been political opposition to the mail-only approach. Statistically, the Republican party has not done as well as others with absentee ballots, and arguably, by extension, mail-only elections would work against them. But now everyone wants to get the job done, and done well.

The mail-only approach reveals a little secret about technology: Once you’ve solved a problem, the less technology, the better.

Oh, there’s still plenty of room for technology here. The signature on your mail-in ballot can be scanned along with your vote. It can be automatically compared to your voting registration. And bad signatures can be flagged for review, as well as “too good” signatures. Nobody signs the same signature exactly the same way twice.

But perhaps most importantly, after nearly a half-century of trying to build effective voting machines, it just may be that voting is not the place to invest in new technology. In what other situation do we try to build one-size-fits-all, absolutely-gotta-work-and-be-auditable technology to be used for a few minutes once or twice a year?

To tech or not to tech … that is the question. I am beginning to believe the answer is “no.” Less is more may be the real triumph here. Now if we can just figure out how to write that into the legislation.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.