I'm a citizen
Nov. 4th, 2008 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yay. Just got back from voting. Actually I was all prepared to post something using my iPhone in line. But the line wasn't that long. To be fair, I got there half an hour before the poll opened to line up. There were just two people ahead of me. I had a blast though. They were neat people to talk to. It's maybe a little worrying though that there weren't that many people in line, although according to the local paper, over 100,000 people in my county had voted early. I'm not sure what percent that is, but I think it's a lot. I just checked Wikkipedia, and the city (which is smaller than the county) has a population of about 91,000 so maybe I'm almost the only one who didn't vote early.
It was cool though, because I was the first to finish my ballot so I got to be the first person in my district to vote today. They had me verify that the box they kept the ballots in was empty, then I watched as they locked it up so no one could tamper with the ballots.
It was funny though. They had three paper voting stations and one electronic one. Almost no one wanted to vote electronic. And the paper ballot was long. We don't have any voting machines that punch your vote. It's more like the SATs where you fill in bubbles. Except in stead of small dots to fill in, it's these big squares you have to fill in completely, and it took a long a time. So all the people that were there after the first three of us, were just waiting for us to finish filling in the ballot. So it's good that most people voted early, otherwise the lines would have been several hours long.
Anyway, that's my voting story. Vote if you haven't, other wise you loose all your political bitching rights for the next four years ;)
It was cool though, because I was the first to finish my ballot so I got to be the first person in my district to vote today. They had me verify that the box they kept the ballots in was empty, then I watched as they locked it up so no one could tamper with the ballots.
It was funny though. They had three paper voting stations and one electronic one. Almost no one wanted to vote electronic. And the paper ballot was long. We don't have any voting machines that punch your vote. It's more like the SATs where you fill in bubbles. Except in stead of small dots to fill in, it's these big squares you have to fill in completely, and it took a long a time. So all the people that were there after the first three of us, were just waiting for us to finish filling in the ballot. So it's good that most people voted early, otherwise the lines would have been several hours long.
Anyway, that's my voting story. Vote if you haven't, other wise you loose all your political bitching rights for the next four years ;)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-05 08:03 pm (UTC)There are so many potential problems with the computers. I've heard from people who worked elections that there were rarely problems with the optical scanners like you voted on, but they seem like a pretty big waste of paper.
Now we have computers with wheels you have to turn to scroll up and down to select then click enter. I don't think they are as problematic as the touch screen ones and have never had any problem at my location, but in some areas they get machines that don't work or don't have nearly enough. And I imagine they could be hacked.