I don’t know the machines, but I’m in Montgomery county MD where we’ve had problems before. The last time they didn’t get the stupid cards there on time and I waited for over an hour to vote. I’m also pretty sure my vote didn’t count because I voted lib on a couple of people and in my district not one of them got a vote. Wonder what happened to my vote. So I’m not OK with the machines this time around either.
I wouldn’t vote on a touch screen. They’re too prone to human error. I can never press the right spot on the new ATMs; I have to remember to press right above it. The machines in my old precinct had a round knob that scrolled (kind of like on a stereo, but not free rolling, it stopped with each turn) and a separate button to select. I was fine with them. I don’t know what it’ll be like in the new precinct.
I voted on a homebuilt PC, running an Athlon 3200+ on an MSI mainboard with 1 gig of RAM. I was completely okay with it, because my desk chair is comfy.
We’re talking about the Pro Bowl, right?
Black non-gel pen, drawing the shafts in to make complete arrows. None of that fancy “electricity” or hanging chads for the Beaver State!
I’m in NE Ohio and in my city we have touch-screen voting. I’m concerned about the stories I’ve read of how easily this can be manipulated and so I requested and submitted an absentee ballot.
Well, I haven’t voted yet this year, but I did a couple years ago. This is my story.
I had to spend an hour looking for my voting card thing. I got online to find out where the church was that I was supposed to go to was located. I had to find the time between letting the dog out and making dinner to go to the location. It was pouring rain which meant that my car wouldn’t start, so I had to get a hair dryer out and dry out my car engine for a while, by this time I was soaking wet. I drove to the designated church, and after passing by it once found that there were no parking spots available. I drove down the street and found a spot to park. This meant that I had to walk through the pouring rain back to the church. I followed the signs to the large room where the voting was taking place. There was a long line to vote so I go to stand in it. I stood there for about 20 minutes before I get around the corner and see that there are several tables all marked with letters and numbers ( like E-4 and B-6, hey you sunk my battleship!). So I ask some people what they mean and they refer me back to my voting card that has some arbitrary letter-number combinations on it. I matched that number with one of the desks, gave up my spot in the line had had been in for so long and went over to the table (no line). I got to the table and after looking at my voter card gave me a ballot thing. They told me to go into one of the small booths covered with stained red, white, and blue fabric that was at least 40 years old and vote. So I go into the booth with my ballot and read the directions. I look at this device that is in there and try to figure out how the whole thing went together. I thought I figured it out right, but just to be sure, I came out of the booth and asked the nice lady to confirm. She did. Great, I am ready to vote. I just have to stick this pin thing into the hole next to the person or thing I want to vote for. So I got through the president and senators and representatives swimmingly. Then came the issues and levies. I really didn’t know anything about most of them other than what they say on TV (which I am pretty sure is not scientifically acurate information for some reason). But they all have a description of the the issue. So I read each article about each issue, ponder how I want to vote and push the pin into the little hole next to my choice. I repeat this about a dozen times. The nice lady at the desk came over to ask I was OK in the booth. I informed her that I was. OK, so now it is on to the judes. There were some names to start with that I was familiar with so I voted appropriatlely for the first few. Then the names started becoming very obscure so I started voting for the one that sounded better. Then the names started becoming the same! A. O’Malley vs. B. O’Malley. What the hell? So I just pick one and I am done. I take the ballot out of the contraption and take it to the nice lady at the table. She asks if everything went OK. I say yes and hand her the ballot. She looks it over, I assume for hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads and drops it into the box. So I leave the chruch and head back down the street in the pouring rain to my car. I was already wet though. I head home and without enough time to cook dinner pick up some Taco Bell. I get home, eat my fast food, and since I am soaking wet and freezing to death, go take a shower and head for bed. It was the next day that I found out that you don’t have to vote for every person or issue.
So to answer the OP, I used the old fashoned kind. It was hard to figure out and was a huge pain in the ass. I was not satisfied.
Why can’t I vote online? I could have done that at work or after I got home and it would have taken a tiny fraction of the time. It would have also saved me the huge hassle of the whole adventure. Seriously, it’s 2006. They need to get with the times.
I guess I jumped the gun with this thread, I probably should have waited till the 7th.
I just got excited about how pleased I was with the new machines here in Denver.
I’ll see your Regent of the Univ of Colorado and raise you TWO trustees for Michigan State University, TWO regents for University of Michigan and TWO governors for Wayne State University. I think Michigan wins the voting for obscure positions.
In Rhode Island we fill in the arrow and it gets sucked into a machine like others have mentioned. It’s not fancy but it’s easy.
You and these guys (PDF: princeton.edu) both.
I suppose I would feel just as OK using the new electronic voting machines as the old paper system. It’s not like I can guarantee the safety of my individual vote either way (actually, I’ve been using absentee ballots since I started voting).
On a larger, tinfoil-hat paranoia level, I do have some concerns wrt the security of these machines.
Hi, Frank. I probably brushed past you in line today when I went to deliver my absentee ballots. It was a bit of a mess what with the door being broken and all.
Anyway, I’m uncomfortable right now with the design of the electronic voting machines and I feel that the software is a bit too easily compromised. I’m not saying that it has been, you understand, but that it could easily be.
So, it’ll be absentee for me for a while.
Bob
Frank, the machine that you used sounds like what we used here for the first time. But I didn’t notice that anything got printed out.
Did an election official have to install something that looked a little like an 8 track tape to get started?
I just voted absentee, but that was a piece of paper and a #2 pencil. However, all of New Mexico is now using a piece of paper and a permanent marker and I assume they’re counting ballots with an optical scanner. According to the Albuquerque Journal, there’s been a learning curve. (I guess it’s been too long since the SATs for some of these early voters.)
I have no problems with the system that I can think of.
Voted last week in municipal elections, for a total of two positions: mayor and councillor. The ballot was a “fill in the dots” thing. Then I put it in a full-size envelope that covered the votes but left the end sticking out. I gave it to the poll clerk, who fed it into a scanner, which sucked it out of the envelope, scanned it, and deposited the ballot into a sealed ballot box.
I liked that system, since it combined the efficiency of electronic counting with a physical ballot, available if re-counts occurred.
Here in Minnesota, we used to have those, but the new ballots have circles to fill in (just like tests in school). After you’re done, you feed them into an optical scanner (and they bounce back at you if you did something wrong like vote for 2 people for the same office).
I think that system has some real advantages over the touch screen machines:
- an absolute paper trail. That could even be counted manually, if needed.
- a paper trail that can easily, cheaply be recounted. The touch-screen machines that display a paper receipt ballot under glass, then drop it into a bin would be an absolute horror to recount – very slow, and very expensive. Recounts don’t mean much if they’re too expensive to actually do.
- cheaper. Only 1 expensive optical scanner per precinct. vs. many expensive touch-screen machines.
- all ballots, including absentee, assisted voters, etc. go thru the same machine. No separate totals for them (privacy issue) and no chance for their votes to be ‘forgotten’.
- faster, fewer lines. One time I voted when they were real busy, and all the ‘booths’ were full. So people just sat down at nearby tables and filled out their ballot there.
- can’t ‘fix’ an election by manipulating how many machines are assigned to precincts. (Like in Ohio in 2004, where white suburbs had lots of machines, and minority urban areas had few machines and hours-long waits.) When all you need is the paper ballots and pencils, corrupt officials can’t play that game.
- more fail-safe. If the scanner breaks down, you can still fill out your ballot and leave it to be counted later. Voting doesn’t stop. We once had electric power go out in a polling place during the election. People continued to vote, filling out their paper ballots by candlelight. (It was in a church basement; they had plenty of candles available!) That won’t work on touch-screen machines.
- finally, greater voter confidence. People are used to paper ballots, and trust them more than the new machines.
I much prefer the system of paper ballots & optical scanners. (There are still ways to cheat in this system, but they are harder to do and easier to catch.)
t-bonham@scc.net beat me to it, but I cast my vote (absentee) on paper, with the pen I had in my shirt pocket. I second all that t-bonham@scc.net said about the current Minnesota system. Good stuff.
Well, around here we don’t vote for another week, but I’m sure it’ll be the same as last year: you check in, get your ballot and your pen, go to your private little cubby, vote, and put the ballot in the box.
Now that the day is here:
Bump.
I know there’s been horror stories about the Cook County voting machines from the primaries but, out here in Chicago’s southwest suburbia, we had optical scan machines. Fill in the bubbles and slide it into the scanner which made a little click and showed the Ballots Submitted number go up by one. So I felt pretty secure in it – I knew my ballot was acknowledged and there’s a paper trail in case the electronics fail.
FWIW…there’s a number you can call if you think there’s something funny going on at your polling place: 1-888-DEM-VOTE. Call the number and don’t leave the polling place.
Be interesting to see if anyone uses the number today…