On Nov. 6, I will gather my passport, South Carolina driver's license and my Beaufort Country voter registration card and march down to my local polling place, where my name will be checked against the voter rolls. No voter fraud here; total transparency.

I will then be directed to a "black box" to cast my votes, and the transparency ends. I have no idea whether my votes have been recorded correctly. I have no way to check the output of the black box against my input. If a re-count is required, the original process is repeated. You shouldn't expect a different result if you do the same thing.

In this day of programming errors, malware, hackers and mishandled data, there must be an independent method of verifying the vote. Paper ballots marked by the voter and read by a machine is a reasonable method.

It is not acceptable to turn this basic citizen right over to the current murky process. We are assured that the process is bulletproof and nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong ...

Randolph Elliott

Beaufort