Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Go vote! (Aka, "Already disenfranchised")
I went down to my local polling-place today, in the morning this time. My new bicycling habits may have any number of upsides, but lots of energy in the evening isn't one of them.
I finally found my registration card after a minute's fumbling, and handed it to the poll worker. As she was finding my name in the book, I looked over at the vote scanner (King County uses Scantron style ballots, which look disturbingly similar to SAT tests, with the little bubbles you fill in). There was a woman standing over it, with the machine pulled partially out of its housing. Someone had just approached with a vote sheet, and she instructed him to "just put it in the slot there," which I later learned is where absentee and provisional ballots go. The woman in front of me looked up and said, "would you like to vote electronically, or by paper?" Without considering the implications of the broken scanner, I said, "paper please."
I don't understand why more voting districts don't use the Scantron type of ballot. It's electronically countable, verifiable, and leaves a clear paper trail. I guess its major downside is that you have to print the ballots days beforehand, and last-minute changes are impossible. Scantron (or whoever makes King Co.'s scanners) may also charge a lot for printing for all I know, but it seems to solve a lot of the complaints with the Diebold machines. There's no way I'm going to accidentally fill out the bubble next to the candidate I don't want.
In any case, I filled out my ballot, even filling in the unopposed races, thinking to myself, "how crappy would it be to lose an unopposed race because no one bothered to fill in the little bubble?" Once I got it all filled out, I took it back, and slid it into the Memory Hole.
I stopped on the way out, and asked the head poll worker (who'd been hovering over the non-functional machine before) what was going on. It came out that she'd received a bad memory card for the scanner, and was awaiting a new one. "It's been over two hours, so I'm expecting it any minute," she said.
I asked what happened to the ballots which didn't get immediately scanned. "Well, they'll go into the Uncounted Ballots bag, and be counted at the county elections office." "Presumably counted," I corrected her, since she'd earlier admitted that no one had told her what actually happened with the Memory Hole ballots. "Right, but we just have to trust in the system. Every year, I've seen improvements in the process." She paused. "And that's a good thing," she cracked a grin.
I thanked her for the explanation, and she thanked me for stopping to ask. I think she was surprised to see anyone was interested enough to care about the process.
And I care enough to worry that my vote really won't count, this time around.
Posted at 10:16 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater