Voting Day

[rain_gryphon]

Well, I had to stand in line two and a half hours to vote. Fortunately it was a large building, and we were inside out of the rain most of the time. I've never had to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes before. In a way it makes the whole thing more memorable. I enjoy the actual voting process - standing in line with one's fellow citizens makes it more meaningful.

I was the 216th from my precinct to vote, and that was at about 12:30, after the polls had been open since 7:30am. They're processing about 43 voters an hour with three machines. Considering that the line closes at 7:30pm, and there are about 1300 voters in my precinct, that's about 40% turnout if it keeps up at that rate all day.

That seems frightfully low to me. I'm guessing there's going to be a huge surge at 5pm, and they'll be voting all night.

We used electromechanical voting machines, which I suppose are reasonably trustworthy. I'd much rather have the old punchcards or Scantron cards. I've never been able to see much merit in the argument that these are unfair because some people are too stupid or careless to use them properly. I'd a lot rather have a paper trail.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Eep! That's not a very good throughput, no.. are things simply moving more slowly this year, for some reason, or does there seem to be a higher turnout than usual?

I'm not sure if it's universally the case, but as far as I'm aware, all UK ballots have been on the same system since the dawn of the age of papyrus: a small piece of paper with some names and a box beside each. Mark a cross or tick in the box of your choice, fold the paper, and stuff it into the ballot box. Each locked box is then taken to the counting station, where many volunteers tally up the results.

I wish there'd been far greater transparency in the rush to electronic voting - there've been some disturbing problems with various of the systems now in use, including inaccurate tallying of votes, inadvertent resets leading to loss of votes, and a "double book" system by the central collators in certain revisions of the software. It'd be nigh impossible to make any system absolutely fraud-proof, but strong encryption and hash verification don't seem to have been high priorities.

Still, I'm hopeful that, for the most part, things will proceed in a spirit of fairness. Voter intimidation will hopefully not be a large issue, with many volunteers on duty to guard against illicit behavior, and veritable squadrons of lawyers on call on lines like 1-866-YOUR-VOTE, plus a fair few international observers.

Should be quite an exciting night.

I read of one democracy enthusiast who'd bought a now-surplus mechanical voting machine, and was going to be using it for people to order drinks at his election night party.. ^_^

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The new machines are much slower than the old cardpunch stations. Punching a card used to take about two to three minutes, and voting with the machine takes around four and a half. I'm not sure why that is - it took me that long too, though. In theory it should be faster, but between the maintenance that the workers have to do between voters (check some telltale on the back of the machine, record the value, and slot your 'ticket' on the side) and the display itself (not really confusing, per se, but you can't just scan it and punch like you could the butterfly books) it just takes longer.

Turnout is heavier too, I think, but the machines are just plain slower. I'm sure that they'll have more of them in future, if they mean to keep on with those.

[tirran.livejournal.com]

Apart from one brief discussion about using electronics (and, if you're so inclined, you can contemplate the punning nature of that word in this context ;-) we're the same way in the GWN; we still use paper ballots and pencils - and, most significantly, non-partisan vote counters (except for one incident during the Quebec referendum.) And I think the longest I ever had to wait to vote was about a minute, but everyone had just got off work...

As far as the results go... acch, political prediction is a mug's game anyway. All I will do is repeat a movie tag line that occurred to me after listening to the debates: "Whoever wins, we lose." <sigh>

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

I was 180th in my precinct at 7:35am. Things didn't seem to be running fast to me, either. Ouchies at 216th at 12:30...