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November 02, 2004
Election Day 2004
I went out to vote today. Since I'm a big supporter of voting privacy, I'm not going to tell you who I voted for. I will, however, share some thoughts on my experience today.
First of all, I appreciate the efforts of volunteer election judges who were working at my polling place today. For the most part, the judges did the best they could to smooth the process of voting. However, there were definitely some issues with speed of processing at the sign-in/registration tables. There were two lines, 'A-R' and 'S-Z'. Since I'm Kathy Wang, I was in the 'S-Z' line. This line did not move nearly as quickly as the other line. In fact, I'd say it moved so slowly that I saw about a hundred different people pass by me in the other line. When I got to the registration table an hour later, there were these two little old ladies there. Isn't there some form of efficiency management in place? Couldn't they have swapped one of the ladies with another person at a faster table so that the total speed of processing goes up? We geeks call this 'load-balancing'.
So, I finally get to the voting station and cast my ballot. By the way, although this isn't my first time voting, I still feel this awesome sense of purpose as I cast my votes. I think that's really cool. My precinct used paper ballots, and before you start thinking that I live in a podunk town or something because we're not using electronic, touch-screen computers, here are a couple of articles written by security experts about why the paper system is still better.
Anyhow, I walked over to the reader machine after I filled out the ballot, and the election worker who was standing next to the machine - presumably to ensure that the machine and/or ballots are not tampered with - decided that he needed to take a break. That's not such an amazing thing, except that no one replaced him to watch the machine! I was just dumbstruck, but sent my ballot throught the reader. Who knows, if I wanted to, I could have put in two paper ballots while there was no one watching the reader machine. Not good.
Next, I headed to work, and heard some disturbing things from other people. Apparently, there are some other precincts that did use electronic touch-screen type vote casting machines. Well, it turns out that some people couldn't figure it out. For example, at the conclusion of the voting process, the computer returns a screen saying something like 'If you're done, touch the big red box'. I'm just paraphrasing here, I didn't actually see the screen. Well, some people left their voting booth without touching that red box on the screen. So, I guess if the next person wanted to, could they have hit a 'Back' button and changed the previous voter's votes? Just wondering if this could have happened. This way to fix this problem, I think, would be to print out some form of a receipt - I think at least some of Nevada's booths do this - so that the voter knows that their vote process is over. So, much like an ATM transaction, if you didn't get a receipt, something's wrong.
Hopefully, this election will not be the mess that the 2000 elections were. I'll probably be up until midnight to see what happens with the election results, but I'm not holding my breath that there will be a definite winner by the end of today.
Posted by Kathy at November 2, 2004 10:19 PM