I'm a registered Dem and went to vote today in CA. I'd seen the Courage Campaign awareness efforts and dday's posts alerting us that Decline to State (DTS) voters to the fact that they had to specifically request a Democratic ballot in order to vote in the primary.
I thought that as a registered Democrat, my ballot wouldn't feature that line.
After they handed me my ballot, I was directed to go to one of the polling booths marked "DEM". I was surprised to see that I had to ink that spot on the ballot as well.
Okay, I thought: it seemed like the ballots were the same but maybe the instruction booklet was different? But I was voting in a DEM booth (the instruction booklets are attached to the booth).
Strange.
But okay, right? So everyone has to fill in the dot for Democrat. The only way registered Dems aren't caught in this trap as well is that the scanner will catch it.
The scanners will catch that, right?
I don't think so.
[over the flip]
Except for two things:
- the scanner wasn't working at my precinct;
and
- that's not the way scanners work.
I worked the polls in 2006 and scanners catch two errors only: they reject blank ballots entirely. And they kick a ballot back if someone has voted twice for one candidate/proposition.
As far as I know, that's IT.
If you didn't enter a vote for a particular selection (race/proposition), the scanner will not reject your ballot.
Undervotes do not register on scanners. The scanners were added in 2006 to make sure people didn't push the pen through the metal hole time after time, happily thinking they'd voted the whole time, then not check the ballot afterward and thus not realize the whole thing was blank. (They typically give you an envelope to put it in, so it's surprisingly easy to do.) The scanner also wanted to stop people from submitting ballots that had more than one vote for a race, because that invalidates your whole ballot.
It is not the job of the Registrar of Voters to make sure you didn't skip a race. It's to catch gross errors that were obviously unintentional. Undervoting is not considered unintentional.
So it's possible that they've reprogrammed the machines to inspect whether that particular bubble had a mark in it this year.
But that's not the way it worked in 2006.
I could be wrong.
But we may be looking at bigger problems than just DTS votes.