Simple Concepts in Election Planning

Attempting to be a good citizen, and with my sample ballot and judicial retention research in hand, I headed off to my local polling place this morning to cast my vote. The whole process took me almost half an hour. Of that time, only about 10 minutes was spent actually filling out the absurdly formatted ballot. So, in honor of that, I bring to you my list of Simple Concepts in Election Planning:

1. The people responsible for looking up a voter on the rolls should be able to see.
The woman at the table must have been almost blind. She had to look at every page she turned to in the rolls for about 10 seconds.

2. The people responsible for looking up a voter on the rolls should know the alphabet.
Same woman: could not figure out which book I was in, and then having found the right book, could not locate my name in the book. (It was in the right place, of course.)

3. If you deliver to a polling place enough stations for 9 people, you should include enough equipment for each station to be operational.
There were 9 stations - 1 electronic voting booth and 8 booths for filling out paper ballots. However, there were only *FOUR* (4) of the special pens ("archival ink") required to fill out the paper ballots. Thus, at any given time only five people could be voting.

4. Paper ballots that require special pens are a bad idea.
See #3, supra.

5. Make sure that extra supplies are available.
If special pens are required, there should be extras available, not merely one for each station. What happens when one or more of them run out by the end of the day? Or if someone accidentally puts it into their pocket/bag/purse after voting? Can you say disenfranchised?

6. Paper ballots that require more than a simple mark (a check mark, a punch hole, even a filled in circle) are a bad idea.
These ballots required filling in the missing portion of an arrow pointing to the candidate for whom you wished to vote. Tedious and time-consuming, it added to the frustration of seeing 4 people voting for 10-20 minutes each (depending on whether they knew who they wanted to vote for ahead of time, how sharp they were, etc) while watching 4 stations stand empty.

Tell us about your voting experiences. LRB wants to know.

QV.

Comments

[Dave!]

I was in and out in about 10 min total. Short line, but good poll workers and enough stations. The pen thing is really stupid, though.

[Hunc T. Caveto]

Dave, of course you were in and out in 10 minutes, everyone knows that they throw out all of the Cook County ballots outside of Chicago anyway so what would have been the point to keep you waiting?

I was part of making the 'early and often' Chicago voting a reality by using Chicago's early voting option last week. It just goes to show the stupidity of the old written voting roles that they use in most precincts, because anyone in cook county could vote early downtown, they just looked up your name and address on their laptops and got us going.

They only had the touch screen voting machines there, so I didn't have the joy of trying to color within the lines. I can't wait to see who I will end up voting for after the hackers are done!