Polling Poll

[lady_branwyn]

I didn't realize how primitive the polling technology was in my county until my sister from Maryland broke out laughing when I told her that we still used the little stylus thingie. Since then we've taken a step backward, going to a paper form with ovals to fill in.

[Poll #1640022]

Comments

[lin4gondor.livejournal.com]

We use a felt tip pen to fill in a broken solid line next to the name of the person we want to vote for. I actually like it that way, as it's pretty difficult to mess it up. :-D

We voted in Wisconsin, as we are still registered there. Not sure what they use in Chicago, but I hear it is something more sophisticated and easier to mess up than the paper and pen routine.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

I liked the stylus thingie because it was easy to use, but I always lived in terror that I would punch the wrong choice and have to ask for a new ballot. And I recall that the stylus thingie was the source of the infamous hanging chads.
The felt tip pen method doesn't sound too bad. We have ovals like you find on a standardized test form, and you have to fill them in with a ball-point pen which is tedious when a line of people is waiting for your voting booth. *grin*
I supposed I could vote in advance (they are pushing that around here), but I do like the communal experience of going to the little church to vote with the people from my neighborhood. :)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

NY State *had* lever voting until pretty recently - they've been trying to get everyone used to OMR.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

The first time I voted I was so disappointed that we didn't have lever machines. Those were what they always showed in old television shows, lol. Either lever machines or actual ballot boxes.

[roh-wyn.livejournal.com]

I subverted your poll by answering tongue-in-cheek, but to be honest, writing choices on a pottery shard might be safer, lol.

Our precinct is a hybrid, with some optical scan and some digital voting equipment. I think some rural precincts still have paper ballots, but it's only a handful of counties.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

writing choices on a pottery shard might be safer, lol.
Then we'd have hanging shards... :D

[jay-of-lasgalen.livejournal.com]

In the UK we put a mark next to the candidate's name. It's not even scanned - votes are counted by hand.

[lilan14.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's the same in my country (Ukraine).

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

The range of practices is interesting. I admit to feeling a little nervous about entirely electronic systems where there is no paper trail.

[lilan14.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, especially after the 2004 mess. I later saw quite an interesting documentary about the electronic safety and the protection of data once it was entered into the server. It sounded like the system was reliable...unless someone set up a transit server that intercepted information and altered it before sending it to the destination server.

Really, fancy security seems to always lead to new fancy ways of breaking it. (I don't know if it scares or reassures me, though! I really don't want machines around that are smarter than people, LOL.)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I kind of like that - you have the competition between various constituencies for speed-hand-counting. (I believe one of the Sunderland ones won last time. Again.) Also, reliability.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

Well, given some of the vote counting problems we've had over here, maybe by hand isn't such a bad way to go. :P

[just-ann-now.livejournal.com]

We have touch screens! Very new - this was, I think, only the second time we've used them. The bigger technological advance was in the voter check-in line, where they now had laptops, rather than the pages and pages of computer-generated sheets to look up our names.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

Do you get some sort of receipt after you vote? We still have the big loose-leaf binders containing the voter registration rolls.

[just-ann-now.livejournal.com]

We get a sticker that says "I voted". All the cool kids were wearing them at my school!

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

No, I mean something like a printout showing who you voted for.

[wizard42745.livejournal.com]

Love the last one, LOL. I think I used that the first time I voted!

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

I remember staying up until the middle of the night to hear the election results. It was actually kind of fun. Now they call the races so very early. The first time I voted was with the machines using the little stylus (the aptly-named "Vote-O-Matic," lol).

[telperion1.livejournal.com]

When I was in Ohio I voted early, which (at least in my district) meant circling a name on a sheet of paper, using a traditional pencil. Talk about antiquated! So that writing-on-shard answer wasn't completely facetious...

As for NY... well, in 2008 I as still registered in Ohio so I did a mail-in ballot. This year I was disenfranchised! I was called up for jury duty but didn't get the first notice. Apparently if that happens here and you don't respond you lose your registration until you answer the court summons. I was excused from voter registration for, well, being a philosopher. But I didn't realize I also had to re-register. *rolls eyes* So I don't actually know how they vote in my state.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

You are excused because you are a philospher? *eyes wide* Is that sort of like a clerical exemption?
The mail-in is convenient, but I have this sneaking fear that I would send mine in and then two weeks before the election discover something horrible about the people I had voted for (though that is always the risk after the election).

[telperion1.livejournal.com]

It was the weirdest experience. When I was being questioned they asked me if I would follow my own personal morality or do what the law required. I politely said that I couldn't answer and (after they let me explain that I wasn't refusing to answer but literally could not answer b/c neither option was true) the state's lawyer objected. I later asked why because I was curious, and was told that apparently they thought Icouldn't think about "reasonably certain they're guilty" in the same way most people would.

And, frankly, they weren't wrong...

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

We have to use a pencil to make a cross on the form, which is counted by hand.

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lot of places still do that.