For the 3d time in my life I volunteered to work the local polling place Tuesday. It is a LOOOONNNGGGG day, which somehow manages to go pretty fast.
We were using the "new" InkaVote system. In other words, you stick a special little marking pen in the holes where you used to stick the little gizmo to make holes, creating chads. Now, no chads. Unfortunately, we discovered the ink pen thingie doesn't always work !
This is a scanned system. You have a ballot card with little dots on it in little circles next to numbers you can relate back to candidates & ballot propositions.
One of the weird things, though, is how many people don't know what party, if any, they signed up with. In CA you have your Dems, Reps, Natural Law, Green, American Independent, Peace & Freedom, & Libertarians. Or you can be NonPartisan & still vote Rep/Dem/American Independent.
But every now & again the roster turns out to have you listed in a party you would NEVER sign up for ! It kept turning up Tuesday that way, with no discernable pattern.
Another weird thing is that some people have tried repeatedly to get dead relatives off the rosters, but it doesn't work ! One very much alive lady's name was removed instead of her very dead father's-- & she had tried 10 times to get his name removed.
At the end of the day, though, our books balanced. Every ballot card accounted for, all the roster pages signed in the right places, everything sealed & on its way to be delivered to the collection point within an hour & a half of the closing of the polls.
But once again, the results were on the radio already before we ready to deliver the ballots to be counted.
How in the hell do they know the results of millions of ballots that haven't even been submitted for counting ? And don't tell me exit polls ! I just don't think Zogby et al are all that good.
Unfortunately, a lot of people never showed up to vote because the media had called Super Tuesday as a complete sweep for Kerry at 5pm California time...
Heaven only knows how many votes weren't cast in California because we cannot seem find a way to have primaries of states all in the same time zone, or embargo results from the east coast until the west has finished voting. There has to be a way-- & we need to find it & implement it before the 1st Tuesday of November or I'm going to be making the same complaint eight months from now.
