Signs, signs everywhere. It will be a great relief when the visual pollution of signs is removed after the election is over and these reminders of our voting ignorance will be thrown away or stored until the next onslaught.

How we select those among us who will make or break everything from our nation’s economy and our global environment to our local sewer lines and street potholes is alternately mysterious and exasperating. Yet here we go again, plastering our yards, car bumpers, and lapels with names and logos of those whom we support, whether for president or dogcatcher.

Signs are pure and simple name recognition devices to fool our lazy brains into believing we’ve at least heard of a particular person before. We tend to equate (with fl awed logic and values) the number of signs a candidate has with his or her level of support from fellow citizens. That imagined support in turn seems to influence us, but if we took the time to examine candidate platforms and backgrounds, we might wind up appalled at whom we’ve supported and where they got their money.

It is a national shame some of the best people suited for elective off ce may not have the money or may not be willing to play the game of promisingthe-moon to buy name saturation. Worse, nowadays money fl ows from invisible hands out of national political party coft ers to infl uence state legislativeraces, and no one’s the wiser.

Our campaign spending in the United States is probably greater than the GNP of several countries in the world, and global election tactics vary greatly.

For example, on a trip to South America in 1996, I was fascinated by giant numerals I saw on posters or painted on hundreds of walls, sometimes in conjunction with a candidate’s name and/or picture, but most often the image was just a number.

I was told that for a large segment of the population that cannot read, candidates identify themselves by a number that people mark on their ballots.

Across the world and throughout history, campaigning and voting methods have been both creative and challenging.

Much hoopla was made in the media, for example, of the indelible purple ink (to prevent multiple voting) on Iraqi voters’ index fi ngers.

They stamped their ballots for the first time following Saddam Hussein’s fallen dictatorship. Whether votes have been scratched onto palm leaf strips or pottery shards, recorded on papyrus or paper (both were scarce and expensive at one time), represented by black or white balls dropped into a voting box (how one gets “blackballed”), selected on voting machines or touch screen computers that leave no paper trail, or from countless othervoting iterations, all are subject to cheating, error, theft, corruption, loss and challenge. Florida’s hanging chads that changed history in 2000 for Misters Bush and Gore - and all the rest of us - come to mind.

The connections between voting machine manufacturers and their political party aff liations are sometimes shady enough to send chills of fear for election fairness down cognizant spines. Why anyone would trust his or her vote to a machine, where the software can bereprogrammed, is beyond me. I stick to paper not because I’m old fashioned, but because I think it’s still the hardest ballot to mess with, unless it’s lined with chads to be punched, of course. For a criticalthinking exercise on voting machinery, go to truthout.org and search, “Will Bain-linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?”

This year’s election drama centers on voter identifi cation and the possible exclusion of legitimately qualifi ed citizens from voting becauseof an endless assortment of hoops, loopholes and frustrations. Also, our town, and no doubt every town, seems frequently to sufter polling confusion due to location changes, poor signage, poor parking, diffcult access, etc.

Consequently the mantra that keeps making my head hurt drones, “We can land probes on Mars, and put humans on the moon, but we can’t guarantee fair elections!” You’d think after at least a thousand years of trying, humans could fi gure out this process.

We should thank our stars for the ritual of voting, never agreeing to accept “an app for that” as a substitute.

After all, voting determines the future of our country and the planet, and we should take a few minutes out of our year to pay attention to that fact and to pay respect to ourselves and to each other.

FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 10/21/2012