I voted before watching the final 2016 debate, toward the end of the first day of Tennessee’s early voting period. I neglected to time the process, but there was a short line outside the door that led to a long one inside. It moved slowly, and my ballpark estimate for the whole process was about half an hour. (My mother came along with me, and her estimate’s 35-40 minutes.) What I don’t think gets talked about enough is why it takes as long as it does, where the bottlenecks and problem areas are.
First and foremost: if my mother hadn’t upgraded her walker to one that had a fold-down seat, she would’ve been out of luck. I normally use a cane, and I was in pain by the time I got out. There were no discernible equal-access provisions; are the disabled not expected to vote?
Second, there were local ordinances on the ballot. That’s to be expected, but they could’ve pasted a couple of ballots on the wall so we could consider them while we waited. Is that too much to ask? Further, the language of the ordinances was along the lines of “we’ll strike section X.Y.Z and replace it with this language” — so you get to see the new language, but not the old. How, pray tell, is one to make an informed decision without being able to see what the changes are?
The biggest time-waster was the line, administered by an appallingly limited number of workers — four or five. Remember, Tennessee is a voter-ID state, so they have to look at your ID and make sure it’s valid and you’re you. At least that makes the next step easier: they pull you up in the computerized database to see which ballot you need and print out a form for you to sign. (That part used to be lower-tech and faster: they printed the voter registration logs and bound them in order by last name. You’d go up to the worker who had your section, they’d find you in the list, and you’d sign beside your name. Your precinct data was printed right there, too.) Since this is a relatively large county — I live near, but not exactly in, Chattanooga — there was a wide variety of ballot permutations. None of the poll workers seemed to be in any hurry, so the process of validating IDs and fetching the proper ballots was the biggest holdup. Doubling or even tripling the available personnel, or even using faster people, would have sped things up tremendously.
It’s also worth noting that we don’t use voting machines now. I remember doing so a few elections back — 2004, I think — but not now. Now we get darken-the-oval ballots that we take over to a table and fill in with a regular pen (provided), and then we feed the ballot into a scanner once we’re done. Coloring in the ovals is annoying and possibly prone to errors, but no more so than any standardized test. At no time did I see anyone have to wait for a seat to open up. There was no line once you received your ballot. I doubt a third of the voting seats were occupied at any given time while I was present.
Finally, there’s the end of the process: feeding the scanner. When I got to it, there was an error message on the screen that neither the previous voter nor the apathetic attendant had noticed. (Specifically, it was an alert that the voter may have filled in more than one spot in a race — an overvote.) This hardly inspired confidence. I notified the attendant, and he casually reached over to smash a button, clearing the message. I asked which way I needed to insert my ballot, and was told that it didn’t matter. The machine took a few seconds to digest my choices, but it incremented the counter and didn’t generate any errors.
Now, here’s what I want to leave you with. What I described was my experience in a relatively major, well-populated part of the state. There are four early-voting sites in my county, which is the center of about a 550,000-person metro area, and I’m glad that this site was only a few minutes away from home. It was well-marked, and I had no trouble locating it. That’s wonderful… but there’s still a lot of work to do, and I shudder to think about what people in more rural areas have to go through.
