Let's hope the rest of Kentucky's county clerks are a little more open to change than Fayette's Don Blevins, whose remarks this week to the General Assembly's Task Force on Elections were downright embarrassing.
He claimed the state's voters have been through too much in the past year, so he opposes making timely and significant changes in precinct equipment and voting procedure. "I'm asking you to slow the freight train down,' he told legislators.
Why? Which Kentuckians put changes in election procedure and equipment at the top of their worry list? How many came away from the polls flummoxed or nonplussed?
Mr. Blevins warns, "We're getting this thing too complicated." But the real danger is the bitter controversy that results from snafus and/or fraud at the precincts.
The good news is that Secretary of State Trey Grayson was joined by both Democratic and Republican legislators in supporting needed changes.
The improvements they're pushing include 1) a system to create a paper trail of votes and 2) a period for voting prior to election day itself.
The first of those goals is unassailable. Confidence in the process requires the ability to recheck -- really and credibly recheck -- the votes cast in this new, electronic era. This week's assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology said paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and elsewhere in the nation "cannot be made secure."
The second -- joining the national campaign to extend the voting period and make voting perfectly convenient -- has its critics.
Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson warns that it merely "advances a more contemporary aspiration: to perform every civic obligation individually whenever it suits each of us, in the manner that conforms to our own personal preferences, ideally while wearing pajamas."
Maybe so, but Kentucky has one of the most restrictive voting periods in the country. If you want to cast your political lot other than between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on election day, you have to get an absentee ballot and explain your prospective absence during normal precinct hours. There's room for more convenience, without going all the way to month-long open voting by mail and Internet, which could change the nature of the democratic process and present more opportunities to flim-flam and finagle.
The history of electioneering in Kentucky is replete with fraud and manipulation, so any proposed wholesale liberalization of the process must be carefully analyzed.
How about something between that and Mr. Blevins' timidity?