Comments on: Did You E-Vote? How’d It Go?

By: George Brickner

George Brickner — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:40:03 +0000

I live in suburban Cook county, IL.
We have touch screens and scanners for paper ballots. I think these are made by Sequoia.
I chose the paper ballot. You use a “Sharpie” pen to connect two line segments into a continuous line to vote for a candidate.
When we feed the ballots into the scanner, it’s supposed to check for under and over votes.

By: Chris Bachmann

Chris Bachmann — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:32:45 +0000

The machines were pretty smooth in Howard County, MD. I’ve been putting in calls to those I know who are involved and there were very few problems.

By: Steve Wildstrom

Steve Wildstrom — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:54:15 +0000

I voted in Montgomery County, MD, which has had lots of problems with a Diebold Accuvote TS DRE system and an electronic registration database. Today everything worked flawlessly in my precinct, despite very heavy turnout. It helped that the ballot was very short: President, and all but uncontested House race, school board, a couple of judges, and four ballot propositions, only one of which was at all controversial,

Of course, now that they finally have the system working right, they’re going to retire it in favor of optical scanning. An improvement in terms of verification, but it means starting all over training the poll workers.

By: Wholly

Wholly — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:39:45 +0000

Where I am uses touchscreens but does include a voter viewable paper tape record. Without that I’d have voted on paper with you.

By: mz

mz — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:44:33 +0000

It’s just touch screen voting, nothing exciting. I prefer the old punch ballot….even if mine ended up in the boxes floating in the bay.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:49:06 +0000

A similar situation happened to me during the 2004 elections in Oakland: I had a voter registration card, received documentation in the mail that told me which polling station to go to, but when I showed up, my name was off the rolls.

After that, I had to go to City Hall, wait in line for 2-3 hours (with some would-be voters that were in a similar situation, according to our conversations in line), and then only got to submit a provisional ballot.

That said, I did get to submit my provisional ballot electronically. Trust me, you aren’t missing much…