Did you know that the first time paper ballots were used in an election in the United States was in 1629 to elect a pastor for the Salem Church in the Massachusetts Bay Colony? So writes Douglas Jones of the University of Iowa in A Brief Illustrated History of Voting, a work in progress on the Web, began in 2001 and last updated in 2003.

Did you know that 369 years later, in one weekend election in Michigan, voters sat down in polling places to vote for a total of 50 state officials? In a full year’s cycle of elections, they would go to the polls to vote anywhere from 80 to 175 officials! “Rescue voting from the long ballot,”  decried Earl Ryan, president of the Citizens Research Council of Michigan in an Ann Arbor Rotary Club meeting in January 1999.

As for us, in the forthcoming 2010 elections, I counted 35 officials that each Filipino voter must vote for, from President, Vice President, senators and congressmen to local officials from provincial governors and board members all the way to barangay captains and councilors. Is it not a surprise then that we are bombarded by infomercials, music videos, tarpaulins that blaze names and faces of likely candidates? Have democratic elections become a game of name recall?

“One man shall have one vote”, so stated John Cartwright, the English parliamentarian known as a “Father of Reform,” writing in The English Constitution, circa 1780s, that government by the people and legal equality could only be achieved by universal suffrage, the secret ballot and equal electoral districts.  But did he ever anticipate that the voting ballot can be so long, that it can risk the very essence of the right to vote?

Why do we vote? Because we want to choose those who will represent us in a democratic government? Because we want our elected officials to be accountable, answerable to us the electorate? But isn’t information the heart of accountability, and a well-informed citizenry the driver of democracy? How can we know enough about the candidates or the issues in time for the elections to make a reasonable judgment? How can we even remember all the 35 we voted for after we leave the polling place?

Let’s not ponder constitutional change to a parliamentary system so we have fewer officials to vote for, or electoral reform that shifts to optical scan voting systems that still will use manual recount in case of disputes. Let’s just think about the voter’s ballot education beyond just shading the oval near the names that a voter recalls, beyond the subliminal seduction of political ads. We need a systematic effort to facilitate the flow of information to every voter about every candidate, beyond the issue associated with him/her, but his/her character and moral vision for the nation, and his/her capacity to raise the level of debate beyond his/her own personality to the issues that mean the lives of our grandchildren. At this time, I can only think of the social media as the last bastion for rescuing voters from the roulette of names on a long ballot.

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