Notes from the cutting edge of democracy.

Here are my notes from Election Day (finally):

The day starts early, before 0600 and ends about 15 hours later. If you are lucky.

When we arrived in the morning, we found the electronic voting machines had been stored overnight at the church. (This does sort of contradict the warning not to ever let the machines out of our sight because a "hacker" can spoil the election if he can get to just one machine to insert the "bad code.") We set them up and started them up. Most of them booted up. The hardest part is that "printer" add on. That thing is the flimsiest hunk of plastic ever. It looks like if it were used every day it would last a week. One of the printers didn't work over in the other precinct we were sharing the room with. More about that later.

The training class we attended (prior to election day) was almost fully occupied by instruction and practice in booting up and feeding paper into the electronic voting machines. Very little about the actual process of voting or how to safeguard the integrity of the process.
Note the following from the California Constitution:

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 2 VOTING, INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM, AND
RECALL

SEC. 7. Voting shall be secret.

Photo at right shows the polling place on Election Day. Note the con-spicuous non-secret nature of the voting process.


It was like voting on a public stage!

There were also pressure groups "hanging around" almost all day. For example, there were firemen in uniform there, and there was a group that called itself the "labor alliance" I think there. The labor union people were passing out donuts and sort of loudly proclaiming they were there. Sort of keeping an eye on things. Making sure you vote the right way? Who knows.




The voting officials were also hanging around "helping" people vote. Now, I trust them, but how can we say if everyone "trusts" them? The important thing is do you feel your vote is secret, not just if it is or not. Particularly if you are voting against a popular measure or for an unpopular candidate?

These darn electronic machines are an abomination to the voting process. Not only was your vote completely "non-secret" with interested groups looking over your shoulder, but there were also long delays. It took "forever" (about 5 minutes or so on average) to vote the extraordinarily long ballot.

At one point, we were instructed to give up on the machines and accept paper ballots and put them in a specially marked envelope. Except that there were no paper ballots available, so we had people cut the sample ballots out of the sample ballot booklet and submit that as their vote. Ugh!

"The printout is just ... fluff"

If you find assurance in the "voter verified paper trail," take note of what the field inspector told me. We were checking how much paper was left in the machines toward the end of the day. She said "all we care about is the computer chips. Just submit those chips at the end of the day. Do the best you can. Don't worry about the printouts, the paper is .... just ...(she searched for the word)... I don't know if anyone ever looks at them, they are just tossed." She added, "Yeah, they are just fluff." She said something about how they were put there to give the voter a better feeling about the voting machines, but they don't actually have any purpose.

Unfortunately, I don't think she was exaggerating. There are published reports that suggest that the paper rolls are meaningless. Not only is it prohibitively impractical to even attempt to decipher the paper rolls, but also, there's no authority in the law that tells us what to do if the paper disagrees with the computer memory chip! Think about that, if there's no authority to re-count anything with the paper votes, why bother with it? It's just the illusion of security!

There was one machine with a balky printer over in the other precinct (there were three precincts in the room shown) and it didn't bother anyone to vote on the machine even though the paper printer wasn't working right. The computer chip is all that counts!

There were some nice parts of the day. The polls workers are all pretty interesting people. And our "inspector" brought enough food and coffee to set up a buffet. Including fresh fruits, pineapples, finger sandwiches and a cheese ball. And then there was that ride over to deliver the memory card ballots. The commentary from the inspector was pretty amusing, but probably not suitable for print. hehe.