I arrived at my Harris County Precinct 0551 polling place, Hassler Elementary, just before 8 AM this morning. The line was about 150 people long, but moved fairly quickly. When I was about 100 people back they called for everyone who's last name began with A-D to the front, as that check-in line was short. I checked in without problem and got my slip of paper, to trade for an access code very quickly, and made it to my eSlate machine without any difficulty at all. We had two rows of 10 eSlate machines in the elementary school cafeteria, and today is a school holiday in our district so there weren't kids or teachers present, just voters and poll workers.
Within a couple of minutes the machine that gives the poll workers their access codes crapped out, and we smelled a bit of a burning smell. Most of the eSlate machines on my row of 10 stopped working. The other row of 10 was unaffected. The poll workers were confused and a bit worried. They called their supervisors, who instructed them to shut down the machines and reboot their system. I continued working, as my machine appeared unaffected, but when I went to confirm my selections the eSlate machine flashed a message saying that I needed to reconnect to the system to submit my vote. At that point all of the machines were rebooted.
Our row of 10 voters was instructed to move to the other row of machines. We were given new access codes, and our original access codes were collected on a table. I don't know that they were disposed of, or kept in a separate location, but when we got our new access codes the old codes were in a small stack by the code machine. I logged in again, with my new access code and voted, successfully this time. By the time I had finished voting, around 8:40 AM, my original row of eSlate machines was back up and running. Throughout the outage the poll workers were quick and organized, although clearly confused and initially unable to handle the situation without consulting their supervisors on the phone.
I have never been particularly troubled by the lack of a paper trail on eSlates, or been quick to latch onto conspiracy theories when elections don't go my way. After this morning I just have a bitter feeling about our whole system...we're the most technologically advanced society ever, why can't we get this right? I am concerned about the stack of access codes that we traded for new codes. I'm concerned that my vote may be counted twice when the original machine booted back up. I'm concerned that there is now no way to track my vote back to my name -- although I suppose that I have my new access code, so the system should be able to say access code 8855 voted for xxx xxx. I'm concerned that the Houston Chronicle published a FAQ yesterday (http://www.chron.com/...) that says if you vote straight ticket, and also click the president of the same party (or any other race) then your vote will be invalidated.
There just has to be a better way.