A new voting experience

This morning, I wandered over to my polling place to vote.  The city where I live had one thing on the ballot, whether to raise the sales tax within the city boundaries. Lots of signs all over the city expressed the two side adequately and I choose (as is my prerogative) to not tell you how I voted.

First, I don't like to vote absentee ballot. I like to go to the polling place and "ink" my ballot. From the looks of things, it looks like I won't be inking my ballot in the near future. They had two electronic voting booths and a woman was trying to find people who wanted to try it out. Apparently, the county of Los Angeles is moving toward this for the next election, meaning the primary in the springtime, and they were testing it out. By the looks of it, they need to work out more kinks in the system. Either that, or the voting machine just didn't like me.

I had my sample ballot's barcode scanned which brought up the pertinent information about me and then the precinct worker put a sheet of paper through a printer which printed my electronic ballot and told me to go over to the voting booth and follow the instructions. So I did. I got one step in and there was an internal code 103 error. Neither worker knew what that meant and they couldn't clear the machine without rebooting it. They also had to open up the machine in order to get my ballot.

Once someone had voted at the other machine, I asked if I could vote on that machine with my ballot. Sure.  So I went through the procedures again and the machine gave me the same error. Until I retired this past spring, I used to teach computers at the middle school. Thinking to myself and troubleshooting, my ballot caused two different machines to error, indicating that it's not the machine, but the ballot that's the problem, especially since it was taking other people's ballots and allowing them to vote.

So now, the precinct workers voided my ballot and we decided to go through the process again with a new printed ballot.  I figured I'd be their Guinea Pig this morning to help them out, although I heard both of them vent their frustrations that they'd not gotten any kind of training on these machines. That, in itself, is a very bad thing if they're planning on rolling these things out en masse next spring.

So a new ballot was printed, I went over to the machine, started the process and got the same error message - Error 103.  Troubleshooting again, now it appears as if perhaps it's not the ballot, but the machine at the source doesn't like me for some reason. Needless to say, we didn't go through the process on another machine after that, my ballot was again voided and I went over and voted the "old fashioned" way, by inking my ballot. 45 minute after I'd walked into the building, I was walking out with my "I Voted" sticker. At the moment, I'm not impressed, nor am I satisfied that this could stop willful hacking of the system. I may end up going to absentee balloting in the future.