Somebody must warn the people!

...to wipe off their greasy black fingers before they vote.

Yours truly just got trained to operate and troubleshoot some charming little theftboxes which I like to call "touchscreen voting machines" for the upcoming Chicago Board of Elections comedy going under the working title of "Election '06." Yes, America: I am a pollworker!

But when the nice, older white lady doing the training suddenly snapped out of her muttering funk, which I recall was about something related to how to clean the touchscreens after people voted, I knew she was about to spit up a true nugget of wisdom and I was not disappointed.

"The biggest problem, we find, is they always get clogged up with chicken grease!" she said.

If one were into that sort of thing, we might even imagine that the government compiled a database of all black voters' fingerptints by scanning their grease-stained paper ballots under the old system. The new one obviously records their fingerprints by virtue of infrared technology built into the screen.

Die-a-boldically clever, says I!