Voting

Oh, yeah. Before I forget, voting on Tuesday was pretty smooth in our district. We had those electronic voting machines which are all the rage these days. There was long line to use them, though, so I just used a paper ballot. No hole-punching here, we were all 1990s and had a Scantron™-like ballot (but were told to use black ink instead of a number two pencil). I was in and out in about ten minutes. When I handed my ballot over to the election officials they fed it into this big copier-looking thing that I'm assuming scanned it and added my votes to a running tally. Over-all, a slick system. In fact, probably better than many (maybe all) the electronic voting machines out there in that a paper trail for each votes exists (the original ballot), but a computer does all the hard work of tallying the votes.

The only drawback in the experience: signing-in. The following has happened at EVERY vote I have ever done in-person. To split up the work-load of getting all the voters signed in, the voting officials form a set of lines divided out by the first letter of voter's last name. They then place a sign or placard with the corresponding letters on the front of the table, taping it to the top of the table surface and letting it hang down the front.

The problem: if ONE person is in line, nobody else can read the sign. With just a handful of voters, it is possible to completely possible to remove any clue which line a given voter needs to be in. As you can imagine, when things are busy, it gets even tougher; in my voting location, it was hard to tell there were even separate lines. Fortunately for me, the line I needed to be in completely emptied out and I was actually able to see the sign and realized I was in the wrong line.

To all poll workers: hang your signs from the ceiling so we all can see them.