READERS WRITE

Without lawsuits, victims lack recourse

George Will’s column “Litigious ‘cult of safety’ puts society at risk” (@issue, Jan. 11) contained grossly distorted examples of lawsuits and misconstrued the fundamentals of our Constitution and America’s appreciation for basic safety.

The Constitution ensures that all people have a fair chance to receive justice through the legal system, even when taking on powerful corporations. Will insists that all lawsuits are “frivolous” while commending a book calling for the end of all lawyers. For Americans who are battling an insurance company that refuses to pay a just claim, are injured by a drug the manufacturer knew was dangerous or have lost their life savings because of an unscrupulous investment banker, their claims are anything but frivolous.

Try imagining a world in which injured persons were not permitted to seek compensation from the responsible party: children would still be wearing flammable pajamas, certain cars would still explode from minor impacts, unsafe pharmaceutical products would still be killing hundreds of thousands, the pipes in our homes would still be insulated with cancer-causing asbestos, no one would know the true dangers of cigarettes and business practices of unscrupulous corporations would be commonplace. People harmed through no fault of their own would have no recourse and corporations would be practically free from accountability.

FRED W. ORR

Orr is president of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association.

Many disappointed about no WMDs

When asked at his final news conference about disappointments, President Bush responded, “Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.” I guess that’s something we can all relate to —- I mean, c’mon, who among us hasn’t felt disappointed that there aren’t more WMDs out there?

GLENN PHILLIPS, Atlanta

Ban on talking while driving a good idea

I was pleased that legislation may be introduced to ban hand-held cellphones while driving (“A ban on cellphones while driving?” Page One, Jan. 12). I have seen no statistics on fatal accidents caused by this activity, but I have witnessed many near misses. The time has come for action.

R.L. TURNER, Atlanta

Fair voting requires better technology

Within the article “Minnesota recount shows other options can be better” (@issue, Jan. 9), when Norman Ornstein opined that 12,000 absentee ballots were rejected in Minnesota, many wrongly or arbitrarily, I was struck again with helplessness and despair. Despair that we the people seem powerless to enforce our will as expressed in the truest sense of democracy, our ability to vote.

In this age of secure Web sites, we ought to be able to go to our polling place, have our identity validated and cast our vote confidentially on a terminal connected only to a local LAN network with no link outside the polling place. The voting data should be compiled on a removable storage medium and transported under FBI control to the state agencies that bear responsibility for tallying votes.

The data would be downloaded to a confidential master database that registers and retains each vote assigned to each eligible voter. If citizens want to determine that their votes were properly registered, they could access, using a unique PIN, their voting record. As it stands now, we don’t know if our votes were properly registered or counted.

This is not a partisan issue. Fair voting doesn’t recognize the voter’s party, only their choice.

PATRICK MULVANY, Newnan