Another Virginia voter checking in. Came back to Richmond today to cast my ballot at home.
No problems here. Lines went quickly. We used scantron paper ballots.
I prefer to think of Alaska as America’s breast implants.
Let’s hope so. :fingers crossed:
Yeah, what’s with that?
When I showed the elderly poll worker my ID, she carefully compared it to the list, then highlighted the wrong name. I pointed this out to her (it was actually my husband’s name that she highlighted, clearly a man’s name but I digress) and she looked at me, seemingly confused. I pointed my name out on the list and told her “that’s me.” She then proceeded to highlight my name, and I told her, don’t turn my husband away when he comes to vote later! She paused and put a little question mark next to his name.
I called my husband and told him what had happened so he could explain if he needed to. After he voted, he called and told me, that he looked at her list and there were quite a few question marks on it. Hopefully most people are noticing when she does that.
(It did occur to me that if it was not my husband’s name and I didn’t point it out to her, I could have chosen not to say anything and came back again later and voted again. But I think the bigger danger is that someone will come to vote and find their name already highlighted erroneously, and not be allowed.)
If their set up is like my set up, you don’t fold your paper. Your long ballot sheet is in a thick folder, and you’re supposed to try to slide it out into the scantron machine, where it grabs it and sucks it in. Problem is that if it jams, or doesn’t accept it, or if you can’t quite slide it from the folder, a lot of people just take the damn thing out of the folder, hold it and feed it that way.
Interesting.
When I voted this morning, you had an option of waiting for a privacy both or sitting at long cafeteria type tables that had no privacy whatsoever. I choose the table so I could get the heck in and out. I am proud of my choices.
Her vote almost certainly did NOT get counted. The volunteer should have given the ballot back to her and told her that the tabulator was saying overvote. Then she should have requested another ballot.
That’s bizarre. We have these little foldout booth thingeys that go around the electronic things. When I was a kid and we had the Great Gray Machines of Democracy there was a curtain. You just vote out in the open? Don’t you realize our forefathers fought like bastards for the secret ballot?
Meh. I would’ve skipped the foldout booth and headed straight for the line to feed my scantron into the box, but there was nothing to bear down on. I don’t care whether my vote is secret or not (though I respect that some people do), so I don’t see a problem with having the option available, especially if it speeds up the process.
We had the privacy booths available, and the folders that give you some privacy before taking your ballot to the machine, but the election proctors or whatever they are weren’t enforcing the use of it. People were filling out their ballot using sitting on the floor without waiting for a booth to open - one woman was using her husband’s back as a writing surface.
We normally share a voting space with another precinct…this year, expecting a lot more people, they split us out. But there was NO signage - you could stand in line for an hour (at 7am - I got there later and only had a twenty minute wait) only to be told you were in the wrong place and needed to go three miles up the road - the road, by the way, that is most direct, is closed today due to road repair.
I don’t think this was a political “try and surpress votes” sort of thing - just incompetence.
I love living in a quasi-rural place. I walked right into my local fire station, voted and wqas done in less than five minutes. I was the only one there, and according to the one and only scantron machine, it looked like only 476 people had voted there all day.
I voted this morning in Blacksburg at this church and have a few issues with that statement. First of all, the road is not unmarked. Secondly, the town is running shuttles to the church from campus every 15 minutes or so.
Other than the church not having enough parking (took the wife and I 30 minutes to park), everything went smoothly even with the long line (students started showing up before 5am to vote according to one of the officials there!). They have nice little touch-screen voting computers there, so no paper ballots to run out of.
Reading this makes me wonder how they can sleep at night.
Not quite. From wiki:
Before that it was not secret, and not only that, you had to take your own ballot into the polling place. If you could get there. Sometimes that wasn’t so easy.
So, presumably literate college kids don’t read the instructions clearly printed on the form, fill out the form incorrectly and expect their inaccuracy to be forgiven? What a buncha crybabies! What is it with people? If it’s not college-educated people fucking up a simple form and crying when maybe they’re not gonna get their way, it’s Florida and Michigan Democrats not following procedure and bitching when it looks like they’ll get spanked!
Fucking follow the rules and play the game. And when you make a mistake, say “Oops” and take what’s coming to you. What’s so hard about that?
I didn’t say our Founding Fathers, I said our forefathers. When we didn’t have the secret ballot we had Boss Tweed. Do you want Boss Tweed? Do you want Rutherford B. Hayes to eat your babies?
While I’m not going to raise a stink about this - bit premature - keep in mind that you have no idea whether the students were informed that they’d have to use their mailbox numbers. For all we know, the normal mailing address for campus residents may simply be the college’s address.
If I ever get to a Floridopefest, I’m totally buying you a beer for that.
There are some babies that I wouldn’t mind that happening to.