Morning Voting Adventure

We voted early this morning, and things seemed to move along smoothly.  I can make no report of polling malfeasance from our little corner of Cape Cod.

I did get a kick out of this:  when we got up to the machine you feed the ballots into, it was locked up with a ballot sticking back out at us.  We asked the poll worker what to do, and she said, "Oh, I've got to get a supervisor," and then spent a couple of minutes looking up and down the gym for a guy.  Then the guy came over and looked at the machine and scratched his head.

This was too much.  I saw that there was a sort of receipt sticking out of the machine with some red printing on it.  I leaned in to read.  "It says to pull out the ballot and put it back in," I said.

"I don't know if we can do that," the woman said.  "Where did the voter go?"

The supervisor tugged the ballot and said, "It's in there kind of tight."

"I think you need to pull it out harder," my wife said.

So he did.  Then he fed it in, and it spat back out again.  So he flipped it over and tried again, with the same result.

This is when I noticed that the ballot had a big black scribble across Question 1, which is an initiative to repeal the income tax in Massachusetts.  I can't know what this voter's true opinion was, but I suspect she must have resented the question being asked, because not only were both arrows scribbled over, but a good portion of the text of the question was, as well.

The machine was clearly not going to accept her ballot with this scribble.  I'm not sure what ultimately happened to it.  I'm inclined to suggest that, if you're not smart enough to fill one of these things out, and then wait for the machine to flash a green light at you (as opposed to spitting your ballot back out into your face), your vote is probably one the country can do without. 

I'm also inclined to wonder what those poll workers are there for (do they get paid?), if not to make sure that everyone can shamble through this process without tripping over their own shoelaces.

Comments

[Rebecca]

I think the poll workers are a mix of paid staff and volunteers. I've never seen a ballot box being unwatched by someone, so I'm surprised to hear no one noticed the uneaten ballot. Hope you didn't have to wait in line long, the place was packed first thing in the morning.

[Chili]

Your story is a perfect example of democracy (small d) in action, as well as a perfect example of why shoes with Velcro closures were invented. The fam and I were 2nd, 2.5th, and 3rd in line to vote on Tuesday and the poll worker who was checking names off her list of registered voters was VERY hard of hearing and wore VERY thick glasses. Result: interactions like ours... 'Last name?....Bilton?.... Dillon?.... Gilpen? ....Oh! Chilton.... Now where? Let's see... Hmmm? Could they make this list any smaller?... I don't see it, can I see your ID to check the spelling?... Oh Lord that's small!....' And so on and so forth. Plus we had literally 25 ballot Propositions to vote on along with all the elected officials. It took me over 5 minutes just to make sure I didn't vote 'Yes on Prop 8' for President! Lucky I had my Zipps on!