What a clusterfuck!
Instead of being sent sample ballots and punching in your votes (that correspond to the sample ballot), now you go to a website, register, fill out the ballot on your device, then get a bar code. You take a screenshot of that bar code. Then at the polling machine you scan it, your filled-in ballot comes up, you make changes or approve it, then put a paper ballot into the machine (you still following this?), it prints it, returns it, you double check it, then insert it again and voila, you’ve voted. Only eleven steps.
Of course if the scanner didn’t accept your bar code you’re at square one with no sample ballot to guide you through your many choices. And if there are paper jams, which there are frequently, or if you’re not tech savvy, or if you enter the polling place expecting the old system – you are fucked.
Oh, and then there are already articles saying the system could be compromised or glitches could screw things up.
And who made this marvelous Murphy’s Law contraption? Someone in Venezuela. Who needs Russia to tamper with our election when Venezuela is so much closer?
I really feel bad for elderly voters. The ones at my polling place were absolutely terrified. They stared at these voting machines like they were MRI tubes. Bar codes and iPads and pushing “next” buttons and inserting ballots. If this is the new system the elderly should be told to vote by mail.
So the result? Lines were longer, by the late afternoon the wait was two hours in many polling places, everyone was confused, and the totals may be compromised. Good going, California. At a time when we need the most number of people to get out to vote and the time we need the most accurate vote count ever, let’s go off an experiment with a wild new system.
Aren’t things bad enough in this country without voluntarily making them worse?
39 comments :
It's almost as if they don't want people to vote.
Passing this link along to friends who are voting experts...
wg
Over here in the UK, every election it's still a piece of paper, a pencil and an X. Unless it's one of the rare votes, like the Scottish Parliament elections, which are by preference, in which case it's numbers.
Given that a large percentage of any electorate are, to be blunt, idiots, it's best to make the voting system as idiot proof as possible, no?
Meanwhile, in Canada, we get a slip of paper, go behind a cardboard screen and make an X with a pencil. The paper goes in the box, democracy confirmed.
What's going on in the US, man? The rest of us are on the outside looking in and scratching our heads.
Just vote by mail. I'm an LA County resident as well and have voted by mail for years. Couldn't be easier.
You prompted me to look up some old news stories about this- stories that predicted yesterday's mess. My God, how do these people get on the election boards to begin with?
@Vrej
There are now two Americas. They don't get along, they don't compromise, they don't even talk anymore. It's basically like living in a huge dysfunctional family complete with a lot of "can't get right" behavior, addictions and neuroses.
Enjoy your life elsewhere. We seem to be living through the national equivalent of a divorce.
Still, here's hoping I'm wrong.
Sean
Remember who was the big celebrity endorser of the New Coke? Bill (Would you like a Quaalud with that?) Cosby.
When Americans come out of a voting place, they get a sticker that says "I think I voted." Like Vrej above, I'm a Canadian who looks at your system in bewilderment. One other aspect that makes our elections smooth, aside having paper ballots that are counted by hand, is that the process is nationalized. The rules and balloting system are the same at every polling place. And private contractors are not allowed to handle any aspect of it.
Ireland's last general election was held on a Saturday for maximum turnout. (It was too close to produce a majority government, but that's a different problem.) Our sacred Constitution, which is harder to change than the Ten Commandments, specifies a Tuesday election for some reason I've never understood, and in November after the harvest is in. That's just one eighteenth century anachronism that needs to change. Also, we have fifty different elections with fifty sets of rules because they're run by the states. It sounds like California's system was designed by Rube Goldberg.
Calling the US a democracy doesn't make it so.
1. Privacy of vote is lost with no voting booth.
2. Vote by mail is convenient but what happens when your candidate withdraws or dies, as has happened. You cannot change it once mailed and your vote is for nought.
3. Another example of change for change's sake, especially doing away with polling stations thus making it more convenient for registrar of voters but not the voters.
Ken, this is long and not really blog-related, so edit or omit as you see fit.
Since I'm now officially one of the olds, I get to opine.
I got my first job writing code over forty years ago (God help me). PC's were a year or so away from becoming A Thing. I worked on a mainframe-ish computer at my job and came to really appreciate the power that digital processing can provide in any application. PCs came along, the world began to embrace them, 15-20 years after that the Internet began to be widely used, Amazon and Google changed people's lives, all seemed peachy. I was happy.
Unfortunately there were things I didn't foresee. With my experience I could do a reasonably good job at noticing when the programs, or complete systems of programs, were crap. But people like me are greatly outnumbered by the people who don't have that experience. At some point the idea that digital processing was magic, and could make anything better simply by being part of it, became commonly held. In addition, in my early career I came to understand the importance of what we then called system analysis. In the beginning I wrote code that sometimes was useless because I hadn't really understood what the user really needed.
And that's where many of the awful systems like the one you describe come from. It's as if people thought that carpenters and plumbers did the same thing as architects. Obviously they don't. You need somebody to figure out what the big picture is, create a plan, and get detail workers (carpenters or coders) to do their work. What we have now is often like trying to get a carpenter to build a house with no floor plan and hope for the best.
I know your son works at Apple. I'd be interested in his opinion.
Paper ballots. They're the only way to fly.
Sincerely sorry your country sucks, which makes it really hard for the people who live there who don't suck. Sorrier still that even if the Republicans are swept out of power in the upcoming election, it will take generations to make your country unsuck. Sorriest of all that your country can't even seem to figure out paper ballots; I guess it's a byproduct of suck?
It was interesting to watch the super Tuesday tv pundits glossing over Colorado since vote by mail doesn't give them exit polls.
I sent in my vote by mail over a week ago, even though Washington won't count it till next week. Vote by mail has the added benefit of avoiding crowds of possible covid-19 carriers.
Washington state has the ideal system: It's all mail-in. We get our ballots in the mail three weeks prior, we fill in the solid circles next to our choics with black pen at our own convenience, and we return them in postage-paid envelopes or secure drop-off boxes before 8 p.m. on Election Day. No need to rearrange our personal schedules to show up at a polling place on Tuesday, no extra expense for the state to organize polling places.
Re: Ron Rettig, the best answer for if your early vote candidate is no longer running is ranked-choice ballots. Your ballot will still count for something, albeit for your second- or third-preferred candidate.
The only issue with Washington's presidential primary system is that we're required to declare a party preference on the ballot. Besides the worry that we'll get on targeted marketing lists, many voters split their ballots between both parties and they don't want to get labeled as officially belonging to one or the other. Some are refusing to vote in the primary for that reason.
Clearly there were problems yesterday, but this account is a little overstated. You are not required to pre-fill your ballot at home and use a QR code. That's only if you want to make your selections ahead of time and (theoretically) get through the process faster at the precinct.
As far as the paper printout is concerned, this is something that voting security activists have been demanding for years so that there is a hard-copy of every ballot cast. My understanding is that part of the reason registration is a little more complicated is that LA County is now allowing people to vote at any location in the county, not just their own precinct. (In most other parts of the country, you either can't vote outside your precinct, or if you can, it has to be done as a provisional ballot that is more complicated and has to be separately verified.)
Sounds way more burdensome than requiring a photo ID.
Yikes! It sounds like voting invented by Silicon Valley, or voting for and by millennials....
My personal system is to get the mail-in ballot, fill it in the night before Election Day, and walk it to the nearest polling place. Works fine.
That's awful. Who know how many millions some company got paid to develop that system. Here is NC we had touch screen voting machines. They worked fine. As you voted, it created a paper backup copy. Then for some reason, we switched back to paper too, which works great, but cost some more $$$$ to switch back. Seems wasteful.
"this marvelous Murphy’s Law contraption." Because it was a giant failure, much like the 1988 TV show starring George Segal?
For those of you referring to an American voting system, there is no one system. Voting varies from state to state. Here in Oklahoma it's a paper form. You fill in the rectangle and place the form in a machine that counts your vote. It took me all of two minutes to vote yesterday. Done and done.
Ken, I'm in the Valley. I got a sample ballot mailed to me, with the barcode on it. I did my research, filled it out. Got in line on Monday at noon and stood in line for 15 minutes before getting inside to vote. I know Pete and Amy dropped out, but no one else was going to, so voting one day early was not an issue. I voted easily with minimal instruction (swipe down since there were 17 Democrats listed as Presidential hopefuls) and the only confusing part for me was after printing out to confirm, that you sent the ballot back inside the machine (like a scanner.) It was pretty damn simple.
Of course, it was even simpler before, where as you say, you mark the circle next to your preferred candidate. But some people complained about coloring in the circles completely then.
My guess is this new method is a step towards "ranked" voting. I even discussed this with neighbors, that I had a "top three" choices for the Democratic nominee. I don't know anyone who lives in Maine, but they did this type of voting in 2018.
The big political machines like making it hard to vote. It makes it much easier to control the voters. When I first moved to Chicago I was shocked. I had first voted in Texas: big piece of paper, black grease pencil (or maybe it was a felt tip pen, I forget, it was a long time ago). In Chicago they had these massively confusing butterfly ballots which would go on to "hanging chad" infamy several years later. Outside the polling place, the ward heelers were handing out sheets of paper that told you which specific lines to punch (not who to vote for even, just where to punch). Disgusting.
Me too.
M.B.
👍
M.B.
In Alaska, we have mail-in and/or early voting opportunities. On election day we get cardstock ballots and a machine which allows one to make a rectangular punch to declare each vote.
(the ones I've used make a clean punch - cousin "chad" need not apply)
They give you "privacy holder" which conceal your punches - then you feed each card into a machine - which (I guess) will read the punches.
This has remained the same for at least twenty years - it ain't broke.
MY favorite times were when I took my boy with me to vote. While in line, I'd explain to him how Alaska "electioneering laws" prevent us from talking about the actual candidates. Part of that was to explain how those laws violate 1st Amendment protections of political speech. No whispering - I wanted to assure tht others in line could hear.
(but then I'm easily entertained)
I should add that the R's in our state often hold majorities in both state houses and the governor's seat. But, while some of them are A$$#o!ES - along with many well-meaning D's - so far we have few restrictions against (essentially non-existent) "voter fraud" .
At some point the idea that digital processing was magic, and could make anything better simply by being part of it, became commonly held.
estiv is a little older than me, so he may recall that this notion was almost a law-of-nature to the ill-informed (98-99% of us) in the 70s - and maybe before that.
Then some of us attended school, learned Basic, Fortram, and/or many other "high-level" languages and wrote some rudimentary "code" - of course, riddled with errors. Blew that notion of "better-with-computers" out of the water.
I know your son works at Apple. I'd be interested in his opinion.
ME TOO! - please contact him with this.
As one of those elders who grew up in a time when schools taught us how to write, I dread this move to kiosks everywhere. And many in my age group seem to balk at punching buttons on some strange machine rather than just signing in or ordering a hamburger, but I guess there is no going back(I can't tell you how happy I am to walk into a place and see an out of order sign on the kiosk that tells you to sign in at the front desk. And voting is something I have done by mail for years. Why deal with the hassle of parking, lines, waits, confusing ballots, etc. when voting by mail is so simple?
I don't think you can blame California on this one. In San Diego County we use a scantron-type form (fill in the bubble).
Why do I feel the need to listen to Bob Dylan's song "Everything Is Broken "?
I posted you blog elsewhere and got this comment. I live in the area. The way this is presented is nothing like my really great voting experience. I love the way it's all set up now — just showed up with nothing but my ID, used the touch screen, and it took care of the rest. Levine did all the extra steps for no good reason other than to write a column about it.
The lines are a new thing, at least in my area. There were fewer polling stations this year, and consequently, longer lines. I don't think think the new machines had much to do with that.
>> Who needs Russia to tamper with our election when Venezuela is so much closer?<<
I don’t know what you are talking about here. I’ve been led to understand that in some places you can actually see Russia from your back porch.
Took five minutes to vote in the Democratic primary in Texas on Tuesday. The county I'm in had to get rid of their punch ballots 15 years ago due to the Florida clusterfark in 2000, but since then it's simply been paper ballots with pencils to fill in the bubble.
Low-tech as possible, but far less confusing, and you do have the option of using the ADA-compliant computer to vote, which digitally marks your vote and fills in the ballot. (The voting judge asked me to try it a few years ago -- it wasn't all that complicated, but it still took longer than just using the paper ballot.) The only downside yesterday was it was pouring when I went to vote and dribbled water spots on the ballot in a couple of places. I'm assuming they dried out by the time it went through the optical scanner and there were no problems similar to missing bar codes or dangling chads.
After the 2000 election and punch card ballots in Florida, there was a big push for electronic voting. "Why can't it be like using an ATM machine?"
They installed all sorts of electronic machines despite all warnings. Lots of vendors made money, and security concerns were secondary. Then came the stories of hacked voting machines, and it turns out the #1 maker of ATM machines was selling voting machines, and was a big donor for George W Bush, and the conspiracy theories started.
I don't feel the problem has been fixed. Instead it has accelerated with vote by mail, vote with an app, and other schemes, all of which seem insecure to me.
Ironically, the butterfly ballot that cost Al Gore the state was instituted to deal with the issue of making it too easy for people to run for office. There were too many candidates on the ballot.
Only barely, tangentially related...
A quote from today's The American Conservative:
"The President of the United States going on national television to jaw about this pandemic that has brought China and its economy to its knees, and now threatens the entire world, talking like he’s Cliff Claven at the bar in Cheers!"
Congratulations, Ken. Your legacy is ongoing.
I don't want to drop links into comments, but for those interested it's in the opening of the article titled Trump: Public Health Menace
I am a BC resident. I thought Washington State had the caucus system. When did that change.
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