The Red Brick Times

I vote at a Baptist church in Vermilion. There are five precincts voting there, so the first thing is to find your own table around the edge of the room. Each table has its own line, and the line for the voting machines snakes its way through everything else. There were not enough voter access cards for people in line, so the poll workers for each precinct had slips of paper with our precinct voting order (I was the 200th). The Secretary of State had ruled that the ID with address requirement was not in force for this election, and theoretically all the Ohio Boards of Election had been told this twice on Monday, and again at noon on election day, but people were turned away nonetheless. One worker at my precinct table noted that they turned away a local policeman in full uniform who had just finished his night shift and who was on his way home to sleep. Since he did not have his home address on an ID, she would not let him vote. I felt more secure already. When it was my turn, I showed them my US Federal Government-issued legal passport. The lady looked at the little blue book with my picture in it and said "What's that?" I could get into the country, but I couldn't get in to vote. So I hauled out my driver's license and then they told me the story of the policeman. What good is power unless you exercise it, after all? So I got my #200 ticket and shuffled into the conga line. Before I got to the machines, my #200 ticket was exchanged for a voter access card and then the fun began.

Card into machine. Touch screen to show ballot. Looking good. The X's light up in the correct places. The candidates and issues filled 12 screen pages. Next - confirm choices. Looks good. Then print the chosen ballot. Now there is a growth at the right side of the machine with a little door that reads "Open to view ballot." I opened it, and through a plastic window saw only three lines of printed bar code on a paper tape near the top of the visible area. Screen says "Print this page" so I touch the button. A computer progress bar appears and fills and vanishes. Next screen appears, with a "Print this page" button. I touch it. Same result. Nothing is happening in the little "Open to view ballot" window. Third screen, "Print this page". And finally, a button that says "Cast ballot." "Ah," I think. "The printer will spring into action once I cast the ballot. The previous screens were the printer buffer being filled." So I "Cast ballot" and the screen shows "remove validation card." Still nothing in the "Open to view ballot" printer window.

I signal for assistance. A polling place judge, a Republican and a Democrat, all go into a voting machine. A new joke, right? Nope. We had them all, and a couple of others beside trying to tell me that after you vote, the printer window always looks like this. They do not hear me when I tell them that it never moved, printed or showed anything else. Eventually, someone comes over with a key and opens the printer housing cover. About 324,234 feet of folded, bunched and wadded paper tape springs free and makes a break for the floor. There is printing on it. The results of each person's ballot who voted on that particular machine. The man shows me the last printed group and says "Here is your ballot. I can't look at it, but you can" and hands me the mobius strip where it exits the printer head. I scan this section until I get to a candidate that I did not vote for. "That's not the way I voted," I explained, and then the fun began some more.

By the time I left three hours later, I had talked to the Board of Elections three times (the precinct workers gave me the number, but there was no phone at the polling place - use your own cell minutes), was told to wait until someone from the IT trouble team arrived, was told that I was not allowed to stay after I had cast my vote, got them to put the machine out of service (they closed one of the privacy shutters over the screen, but left the machine live), had (politely and respectfully) told three voters who went to that machine that it was not working properly, and tried to sit invisibly hoping that the nice policeman didn't come back and arrest me for littering. And creating a public nuisance.

Well, the IT guy came with two replacement voting machines (the machine next to "mine" had some conniptions about an hour later) and I got to talk to a higher-up who told me that, while there had clearly been a mechanical printer malfunction, once the ballot was "cast", it was securely removed from the realm of access or modification. As he put it "Its in the box."

It turns out that he has an IT and Six-sigma engineering background so we discussed statistics and probability and the pursuit of a perfect numerical accounting system. As a result, I may get to assist with the machine testing when the cycle begins again in 2007. I promise to share what I learn about security and the fun world of voting by numbers.

Suffice to say, although no system with people in it will behave all the time, I am intrigued that the mutual suspicions and distrusts between the Democrats and the Republicans keep them watching each other like hawks at the Board of Elections. With dual-access protocols for the systems, one from each camp needs to work with his opposite to get into the data. I just knew that realpolitik had an application in the technical world. Vive la difference.

The ballot error? Since the printer was jammed beyond digestion, there was no assurance that it was my ballot that had printed, or if it belonged to another voter. So since I confirmed my selections on screen before the ballot was "cast", I need to have faith that my grain of sand found its way onto the correct pile. Either that or secede from the precinct and form my own island of insanity. Or maybe that has happened already.
Posted 12:38 AM by Andy (0) comments

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