Tag: voting

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Last Friday, I dropped off my ballot for today’s primary election. I’ve got to say, I really appreciate the new approach in LA County of mailing everyone eligible a ballot, maintaining permanent drop boxes at relevant locations (libraries, etc.), and opening some polling places early to accept completed ballots.

MUCH more convenient than needing the time on one specific day and, in elections with a lot of turnout, waiting 45 minutes, an hour, or longer.

The longest I’ve waited was when I was living in Orange County, either 2003 or 2004, and they actually had to apply the “if you’re in line at closing time, you get to vote” rule. Someone brought a box of to-go coffee from the Starbucks down the street (I think Starbucks might have donated it, too?) and was offering it either to the poll workers or to those of us still in line.

The first election in which the county implemented early voting and flexible polling places (instead of requiring you to get to the specific place on your sample ballot) was also the week before COVID-19 hit the area. Now that I think of it, they still didn’t send out an actual ballot by mail unless you requested one. That changed when it became clear COVID wasn’t going to just blow over before November. Since then some of the smaller, local elections have been mail-only.

Four years….WTF

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Option 1: will do some things you want, and some things you don’t.

Option 2: won’t do anything you want, will do all the same things you don’t want that option 1 will do, has promised to do more things you don’t want, undo the things you wanted that have already happened, make it more difficult for you to even have these choices in the future, and has previously demonstrated that they’re willing to go through with all of the above.

And yet I keep seeing people say they’re the same picture???

Really????

It’s like…you need to hire someone to fix your heater. One contractor will fix your heater for the advertised price, but break some of your windows in the process and stop taking your phone calls. The other will rip out your entire heating system and your plumbing, and steal the copper phone lines to make it hard for you to call someone else (I know, outdated metaphor), insist that you broke it yourself and charge extra. And they’ll break your windows too.

A bunch of reviews point out that both of them will break your windows, so they can’t be all that different, right?

It would be great to find someone who would fix your heat without breaking your windows! But there’s a glass factory in town that wants more business and gives all the local contractors kickbacks, so your best bet for that is to hire someone from out of town…but they’re booked until summer.

So you can either go with the one who’ll break things even more, or the one who will fix some things and break others, and then deal with the breakage while you still have heating, plumbing, and a working phone.

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Whatever you think of the electoral system, the fact that we have to wait for people to copy down those electoral votes is no longer helpful, and the fact that they can choose (or be pressured) to vote for someone else is a vulnerability in our democracy that should be patched.

You want to keep using electoral votes instead of the national popular vote? We can argue about that later. But we don’t need electors any more. Once each state certifies its election’s results, assigning its electoral votes should be automatic. It’s just math.

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Los Angeles County has a new voting system this year. Instead of every registered voter being assigned a specific polling place based on their home address, you can vote at any polling place — excuse me, “vote center” — in the county. There are fewer locations than there used to be, but they’re also open longer for early voting, with locations open the weekend before election day, and some open as many as 11 days ahead.

The idea, as I understand it, is to make it as easy as possible to get to a polling place, no matter what work hours or commute you have to deal with. Hit one near home on your day off, or near work during lunch, or whatever works.

I went in Monday morning for Tuesday’s primary election, figuring the lines would probably be shorter. It was at the local library, and I was kind of amused to see the “Please do not place ballots in book drop” sign, but as expected, there was basically no line. The process was interesting:

  1. They scanned my sample ballot and printed out a code on an otherwise-blank sheet of paper.
  2. I took the paper to one of the voting machines and placed it into a feeder slot.
  3. The machine pulled the paper in and launched the ballot on a touch screen. (The screen was a lot more responsive than the first digital voting machines I used back in the 2000s, where I could actually watch the screen repaint!)
  4. I chose a language for the ballot.
  5. I went through each ballot item, one page at a time. The full name/description was a touch target for each option, and once I’d selected a candidate (or yes/no), I pressed another button at the bottom of the screen to go to the next page.
  6. For items with more candidates than would fit on one screen, “More” buttons would pop up at the top and bottom of the screen. Not ideal, but at least it avoided the accidental-click-while-scrolling problem.
  7. At the end, it printed out all my choices on the paper and ejected it (with the top edge still in the rollers) so I could look it over.
  8. I pressed Confirm one more time, and it pulled the ballot back in for storage.

It also had headphones and physical buttons for an audio interface, and there were a lot of volunteers to help voters learn the new system.

It’s probably the most usable balloting system I’ve used. No paddle-wheel or slowly-responding buttons to overshoot with. No lining up generic scantron sheets with the ballot questions and hoping you didn’t position it wrong. No concern that the lever is going to knock over the cardboard voting booth when you punch it (though I do miss the satisfying ka-thunk! of those levers!)

And I really appreciate that the paper trail is not just machine-readable, but human-readable as well! Because that’s the key thing with ballots: it’s more important to be sure that the count is correct than to count it fast. The only way to be sure of that it to have an offline copy that can’t be hacked, like the paper printout. And a sheet of paper with the actual names is much easier to verify than a grid of unlabeled multiple-choice bubbles that you have to line up next to the right options.

Update: With election day come and gone, it’s clear that my good experience was only because I was there early. Countywide, LA reported long lines and people having trouble with the machines. Even at this same location, people waited for hours — in a primary, which normally has lower turnout. Even though there was another station less then a mile away with no line at all. And even though poll workers told them about it!

It’s definitely going to be a good idea to vote early in November, if possible. Update 2: Or just vote by mail, depending on what the Covid-19 pandemic looks like by then.

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If you have a big problem and a small problem, and you solve the small problem in a way that makes the big problem worse, that’s a bad solution.

Imagine “solving” a squeaky air conditioner fan by breaking the AC completely!

In the US, people voting who shouldn’t is a much smaller problem than people who should be allowed to vote not being able to, or mishandling of ballots after the vote. Voter ID laws and roll purges “solve” the smaller problem by making the bigger problem worse.

(You might already have an acceptable ID, or the documentation needed to get it — and the time and money to handle it. But what if it’s hard to get the time off? What if you can’t cover the fee without skipping meals? What if you need to cross two states to get the docs and can’t afford the car/gas/motels?)

If you assume good faith? Pushing to block people from voting, while simultaneously refusing to protect registration rolls or polling machines from mishandling or cyberattacks that we know are ongoing, is bad problem solving at best.

But it’s hard to assume good faith. Because those ID requirements and purges are more likely to unfairly disenfranchise people who might vote Democratic. And the ongoing Russian attacks that Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to guard against have favored the Republicans.

So it’s really easy to conclude that GOP politicians don’t want fair elections. They want elections tilted in their favor. Even if it means leaving the door open for a hostile foreign government to attack.

And anyone else who finds those vulnerabilities.