I voted, did you?
Nov. 2nd, 2004 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elizillaMichael called me at 11am to say the line was awful, so when I got out of work at 6, I took a folding chair, and umbrella, and a book with me, just in case I got stuck in line for hours. But there was hardly a line at all.
According to the election workers, even though we still had almost two hours until the polls would close, almost everyone had voted. They have these books with lists of names of who is registered. If the voter received an absentee ballot their name is highlighted in pink. Everyone who shows up at the polls, gets their name highlighted in yellow when they come in. There are 30 or so names on each page. As they leafed through, looking for my name, I noticed that almost every page was solid yellow; with only one or two name remaining to highlight. So not only have people voted early, the turnout is huge!
While I was marking my ballot they announced that the 1000th ballot had just been turned in.
We have new polling equipment here since the last presidential election. Four years ago we had punch card ballots. This year we have paper ballots where you fill in a little circle on a scantron sheet. When you are done, you feed your own ballot to a big machine. The machine is labeled Diebold, ruh roh. But at least there is a paper trail! It's time consuming to fill in all those little circles, but I did it very carefully.
On the way out I stopped to chat with some of the campaigners outside. There were five of them. One was a candidate, Kenneth Lindow, who is running for WCC Board of Trustees. He is the only person I saw do any visible campaigning for that office, so I expect he will win. I asked him to do his best to help the MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation runs a rider safety course at WCC) if he gets a chance.
The other campaigners were there for Kerry and for the Vote No On 2 campaign. I talked to them for a bit. They seemed to feel positive about how things were going in this precinct. They said that there was a Republican inside challenging voters, and that he kept coming outside to yell at them. There was an orange cone marking the 100 foot boundary, and he was working hard to make sure they didn't get any closer. Unlike campaigners, challengers are allowed inside where it is warm, so he was in there looking for voters to challenge and watching the campaign workers through the window. I hadn't seen him; I guess as a white person I wasn't a target.
According to the election workers, even though we still had almost two hours until the polls would close, almost everyone had voted. They have these books with lists of names of who is registered. If the voter received an absentee ballot their name is highlighted in pink. Everyone who shows up at the polls, gets their name highlighted in yellow when they come in. There are 30 or so names on each page. As they leafed through, looking for my name, I noticed that almost every page was solid yellow; with only one or two name remaining to highlight. So not only have people voted early, the turnout is huge!
While I was marking my ballot they announced that the 1000th ballot had just been turned in.
We have new polling equipment here since the last presidential election. Four years ago we had punch card ballots. This year we have paper ballots where you fill in a little circle on a scantron sheet. When you are done, you feed your own ballot to a big machine. The machine is labeled Diebold, ruh roh. But at least there is a paper trail! It's time consuming to fill in all those little circles, but I did it very carefully.
On the way out I stopped to chat with some of the campaigners outside. There were five of them. One was a candidate, Kenneth Lindow, who is running for WCC Board of Trustees. He is the only person I saw do any visible campaigning for that office, so I expect he will win. I asked him to do his best to help the MSF (Motorcycle Safety Foundation runs a rider safety course at WCC) if he gets a chance.
The other campaigners were there for Kerry and for the Vote No On 2 campaign. I talked to them for a bit. They seemed to feel positive about how things were going in this precinct. They said that there was a Republican inside challenging voters, and that he kept coming outside to yell at them. There was an orange cone marking the 100 foot boundary, and he was working hard to make sure they didn't get any closer. Unlike campaigners, challengers are allowed inside where it is warm, so he was in there looking for voters to challenge and watching the campaign workers through the window. I hadn't seen him; I guess as a white person I wasn't a target.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 02:56 am (UTC)Is it something like a scrutineer? (We have scrutineers, each party can have one at each poll, they scrutinize, that is, they observe how things are being handled, to make sure everything is handled correctly, and they oversee the counting of the votes to make sure the votes are counted properly. Yes, we still do hand counting of paper ballots. Accurate results, generally pretty quickly, minimal challenges, and paper trail when needed. Scrutineers can demand recounts of sets during the counting, to keep thing clear.)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 05:39 am (UTC)In US politics, the Republicans traditionally accuse the Democrats of getting their supporters to vote fraudulently, and the Democrats traditionally accuse the Republicans of trying to intimidate and disenfranchise certain voters, such as minorities and poor people. The Republicans send out volunteers to watch for fraudulent voters and challenge them, and the Democrats send out volunteers to make sure the Republicans don't intimidate and frighten people with these challenges.
And of course this all gets played out in the heavily Democratic precincts, especially in urban areas with lots of minority voters. The Republicans see no need to intimidate voters in areas where they are winning, plus it's harder to intimidate white people with money than it is to intimidate poor black and hispanic voters. And if the Republicans don't field challengers there's no need for the Dems to follow along and defend the voters. So the Rebublican majority precincts don't have this kind of drama, and the Republicans point to this as evidence that they aren't the ones cheating.