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midday report
We had more voters in my precinct by noon today than we had all day in the Presidential primary. A lot of first time voters. We're hopping (I'm home for my dinner break, to write this and walk the dog).
I have had to assist two mentally-challenged voters. Rule is, if they can get themselves to the polling place, they get to vote. We have a place in the roster to write down the names of the voters who received assistance. Voters can be challenged but I've never seen it happen. They took their task very seriously, though they had even more trouble with the propositions than everybody else. It's painful, by the way, to do this when the person's convoluted logic is taking them in the opposite direction from where you wish they would go, and they keep asking you to explain things and you're being carefully objective and neutral. What's worse is when their logic seems to be taking them away from the thing they seemed to be saying they wanted to do. You can't second-guess them and manipulate them even if you're trying to manipulate them into doing what you think they want to do. If there's anything unfortunate about their vote, it's just the breaks, and your consolation is that you're doing the opposite of voter suppression. It's the motto of our local elections clerk: "Let the voter vote!"
A lot of people seemed to be riding a high when they came to vote. Like they were so glad to vote today that they'd walk over coals to do it, let alone stand in a line. The lines are not Disneyland in quality. They're not that long. But they also aren't that well laid out geometrically. We have the space laid out all wrong and there are four different things they can be waiting for, and the lines end up crisscrossing in the middle of the room. I can't see how we should have done it.
I like our scanning ballot boxes, actually. The voters vote on these huge sheets of paper which are then fed into a scanner which will spit out spoiled ballots. If the problem is an overvote, an extra mark in one of the contests, the voter has a choice of overriding or getting a new ballot. It's really a step in insuring that the voter actually votes the way they intended to.
I have had to assist two mentally-challenged voters. Rule is, if they can get themselves to the polling place, they get to vote. We have a place in the roster to write down the names of the voters who received assistance. Voters can be challenged but I've never seen it happen. They took their task very seriously, though they had even more trouble with the propositions than everybody else. It's painful, by the way, to do this when the person's convoluted logic is taking them in the opposite direction from where you wish they would go, and they keep asking you to explain things and you're being carefully objective and neutral. What's worse is when their logic seems to be taking them away from the thing they seemed to be saying they wanted to do. You can't second-guess them and manipulate them even if you're trying to manipulate them into doing what you think they want to do. If there's anything unfortunate about their vote, it's just the breaks, and your consolation is that you're doing the opposite of voter suppression. It's the motto of our local elections clerk: "Let the voter vote!"
A lot of people seemed to be riding a high when they came to vote. Like they were so glad to vote today that they'd walk over coals to do it, let alone stand in a line. The lines are not Disneyland in quality. They're not that long. But they also aren't that well laid out geometrically. We have the space laid out all wrong and there are four different things they can be waiting for, and the lines end up crisscrossing in the middle of the room. I can't see how we should have done it.
I like our scanning ballot boxes, actually. The voters vote on these huge sheets of paper which are then fed into a scanner which will spit out spoiled ballots. If the problem is an overvote, an extra mark in one of the contests, the voter has a choice of overriding or getting a new ballot. It's really a step in insuring that the voter actually votes the way they intended to.
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