Election Judge Follow-up

[davidschroth]

I have to believe that our precinct must have been setting some kind of record for customer service. One of the judges spent a lot of time giving voters her reading glasses so they could see to vote. And the Chief Judge took the time to give two very, very tired voters (they had walked to the polling place) a ride home.

And as far as the special, first used this year, machines whose name I can't remember - based on our results, election bodies would be better advised to spend their money on an assortment of reading glasses and translators. We steered several obvious candidates to the machine, and they pretty much all preferred to give up on the machine and get a friend or election judge to help them.

We may also have set a record for the highest percentage of spoiled ballots. It didn't seem to matter how we told voters to vote only for candidates in one party, we kept getting voters attempting to vote across party lines. Some of them many times.

Comments

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

The machine in Minneapolis is not a DRE. Instead, it's an assist to viewing the ballot and properly casting votes. The voter puts their ballot into the machine, and uses the machine to "view" the ballot (view might be larger font, or vocal, or some stuff that was never explained). The user makes choices on who they want to vote on, and the machine prevents forbidden vote combinations (votes across party lines in the primary, too many votes cast in a particular race, etc). When the voter has finished making their choices, the machine prints the results on the ballot and returns the ballot to the voter, who then enters it into the optical scan ballot box. A promising idea, but the machine is so dreadfully slow that now one really wants to use it.

Not that it matters, since HAVA pretty much mandates the provision of this kind of equipment in elections.