Early Reports Of Voting Problems Continue

Sigh…

•In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler.
• Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts. Delaware County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly. “We are working with precincts one-by-one over the telephone to get the problem fixed,” Wenger said.
• Illinois officials were swamped with calls from voters complaining that poll workers did not know how to operate new electronic equipment
• In Ohio, some machines wouldn’t function.”We got five machines — one of them’s got to work,” said Willette Scullank, a troubleshooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.
• In Florida, voting was briefly delayed at four districts because of either mixed up ballots or electronic activators being unintentionally wiped out, according to Mary Cooney, spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. Voters were forced to use paper ballots after an electronic machine broke in the Jacksonville suburb of Orange Park.
• In Utah County, Utah, workers failed to properly encode some of the cards that voters use to bring up touchscreen ballots.
• In Kentucky, a school board race was inadvertently left off the touchscreen ballot in two precincts in Bourbon County, requiring the county clerk to make paper ballots on the spot.

What’s frustrating about this is not so much that these problems are going to impact the outcome of our elections, I don’t think they will, but rather that they cause confusion at the polls and turmoil in the political arena where partisans on both sides of the aisle hurl allegations of vote tampering and suppression.
A big problem in all of this is that we cause a lot of the confusion by the way we have our elections set up. Like the fact that elections are always held during the work week, for instance. This means that a lot of people have to fit voting into an already busy work day. For a lot of people it means taking some time off. And what’s worse, remember that most voters probably don’t work in the same voting district they live in, so to vote they have to travel all the way back to their home neighborhood to vote before going all the way back to work again. That might not be a problem for everyone, but for some people it’s a big deal.
And then there’s the fact that most poll workers are inexperienced. Running the polls requires a huge number of volunteers in each state, but most of these volunteers have little experience. It’s not necessarily their fault, of course, because we only hold national elections every two years. Local elections happen more often then that, but there aren’t nearly as many voters for those.
Plus, it seems like in a lot of these districts there’s some new voting method being used every election. They go from punch cards to touch screens, etc. That means we voters are facing a new system for casting our votes every time we go to the the polls.
So how do we fix all this? I don’t think we’ll ever fix all voting problems – any time millions of people across the country go through a process that they only experience every couple of years or so and that is run by relatively inexperienced volunteers there are going to be mistakes and confusion – but there are a few things we can do to make voting easier on all of us.

1. Hold the elections on weekends when most people aren’t at work.
2. Quit trying to be in the cutting edge of voting technology and just go back to what works: pencils, papers and ballot boxes.

I think those two things alone would help ease some tension at the polls and make voting a better experience for all of us.
Update: Oh jeez…

…the Republican Governor of South Carolina has been turned away for not having proper ID, a voting machine wouldn’t accept Rep. Jean Schmidt’s vote, Missouri’s Secretary of State was told she needed a photo ID when she didn’t, and there were problems, some quite serious, all over.
[UPDATE: Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) turned away too... END UPDATE]
This is just not acceptable. We need to have a voting system we can feel confident of, with rules that are transparent, laws that are enforced, and machines that just plain work.

Right.
As I said above, it may be time to roll back the clock to simpler times.