Word: touche
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle - which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World - electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars...
...reversal since then couldn't be more stunning - as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended...
...didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all. (It didn't help that the main touch-screen machine supplier, Diebold, was widely accused in 2004 of ties to the Republican Party.) Fifteen Florida counties adopted touch-screen as well, and they learned the pitfalls of it the hard way, dealing with controversies like a 2006 congressional race in the Sarasota district, where an astonishing...
...often that much of a state is hot to the touch. But that's the case this week in Southern California, as the last of the wildfires that burned more than 500,000 acres (about 200,000 hectares) wink out. Even as the blackened landscape still smokes and pops, the nation is sorting through the equal measures of heroism and folly that accompany such disasters...
...retailers. The Southeast regional headquarters is in Atlanta; the Midwest is run out of Chicago. Both regions are headed by locals, which will give the company more political clout in the sometimes contentious battles for store locations. The store-management structure has been similarly overhauled to emphasize a local touch in marketing and human resources. "It's not that it was too much Bentonville-centric," Castro-Wright says a tad defensively. "That was the strength of the company. But with our growth far away from the center, our model needed to be changed...