The Gaming Den

I just got back from voting (Obama). I was worried the lines would be hours long, and the machines would be Rube Goldbergian in nature. Happily, this was not my experience. The polling staff seemed competent and pleasant. I waited in line for 30 minutes. I left, voted, and was back in just under one hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hX4TC4rP2U

tl;dw version: Waiting 6+ hours in some polling places is in essence a new form of the poll tax. Obviously this seems more likely to occur in more impoverished areas, which tend to vote Democratic.

What has been your voting experience? What shenanigans will happen today, and possibly in the coming days?

My polling place was the busiest I have ever seen it. There were FIVE whole people in front of me. With only 3 machines available I actually had to wait for the first time since I moved to my current address.

It took me an hour, although I arrived fifteen minutes before the polls opened. Got to talk to some interesting people (one of them worked at a local high school and knew a teacher I'd had back in high school, so I got to find out what happened to her).

I voted Obama in the National Election, and then the local stuff was a mix.

In the past I've had to wait up to 30 minutes, but that was before I could go in between the pre-work rush and the lunch-hour rush. Today I had three people in line ahead of me, and the one directly in front of me had a really nice butt, so it was almost like not waiting at all.

My polling place had exactly one machine, but it was an optical scan drop-box, so not exactly an issue. It told me I was the 820th person to vote there today. Apparently the touch-screen machines have trouble with 750/day.

Why the hell does anyone use those things?

I voted at around ten, which may have made voting easier. Virginia has just gone over to scantron ballots, which means that they can have as many as twenty people filling out ballots at once. There was no line at all.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:My polling place had exactly one machine, but it was an optical scan drop-box, so not exactly an issue. It told me I was the 820th person to vote there today. Apparently the touch-screen machines have trouble with 750/day. Why the hell does anyone use those things?

They were seen as more modern and able to get results back faster. Optical scan works faster because it is a tried-and-tested technology and ballots can be filled out in parallel, with only final submission and registration checking having any sort of bottleneck.

Touch-screens have the advantage of being able to un-do a potentially unlimited number of spoiled ballots. To be able to show a selection of languages in any number of copies. And there is no reason for them to have a cap on how many ballots they can fill out, and they could potentially tabulate the data instantly.

Scantron ballots can have the same trouble as punchcards and butterfly ballots - that's all about design. And you have to pre-print all the cards just in case you need them.

The problem isn't that touch screens are a bad idea - merely the companies who had the connections to get them purchased took the wrong ways about to create them: No human-readable accounting. Outdated memory cards. Re-used memory cards. Virus software. Calibration issues. Poorly designed databases.

Any of these things could have crippled a scantron unit (and have) as well - counting incorrectly, being calibrated wrong, adding instead of subtracting, etc.

-Crissa

PS; our neighborhood is definitely one of the poorer districts. When we had only touch-screens they could not have as many polling places open and we had to travel a mile (in a city without open spaces) to get to the polling place. This way it's in our 'block' which is a ten block radius. There's one touch-screen for those who want (they'll run out of ballots and resort to it later) or need it to be audible or in one of the fourteen available languages (we have many refugees and older folk who should be served by their native tongues). However, we picketed so they have printers attached and always make a human readable copy to store for later.

The actual ballots are huge cardboard sheets with an optical scan type (connect the lines, a competitor to scantron bubbles) in the text of each section. It's very efficient races, but less so for propositions. Our wait was about fifteen minutes and they had six booths set up instead of the old four touch screens.

I voted, eventually.



-Username17

Mine had something like twenty small booths and one scanner.
The main advantage of the fill-in-the-bubble technology is that the SATs and PSATs are checked by it and every school in the country uses it, so it has been established to work and the companies that can actually deliver have been identified and checked thoroughly before they were chosen for voting. Also, there are always paper copies of the ballots and everyone under sixty knows how to fill one out.

FrankTrollman wrote:I voted, eventually.
-Username17

Is this your personal blog or something? I like your writing, so this pertains to my interests.

Looking at your flickr account Frank... I realized that we actually look a little like each other.

Except that you've got much shorter hair (then again, just three summers ago I had less hair on my head than you do in those photos, so w/e).

Also, you seem like you really like to wear orange; that or the only two shots of you on your flickr just happen to have you wearing an orange t-shirt. I like orange, a lot, I just never wear it (I tend to meander towards green, blues, tones (black, white, grey, brown) the odd red).

After reading your "voting" story, I guess trying to send your ballot as soon as you did gave you was smart.

It barely gave you enough time to endure Eastern Bloc bueraucracy's interference, and have enough time to have your ballot recieved at the last minute.

Do you plan for several weeks of delays for any of the other paper-shuffling/administrative work that you have to do in Prague?

He wears orange. Alot.

I've bought him umm... I've lost count now, but it's less than five and I think more than two - orange shirts.

I tried to get him orange shoes and orange pants this summer to no avail. I'll just have to send him orange underwear or something.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:He wears orange. Alot.

I've bought him umm... I've lost count now, but it's less than five and I think more than two - orange shirts.

I tried to get him orange shoes and orange pants this summer to no avail. I'll just have to send him orange underwear or something.

-Crissa

Ok, I guess I made that call right.

The funny thing is that it suits his complexion and doesn't make him look sickly or odd.

Me, I actually feel wierd when I deviate too far from my wardrobe's range of colours. I have a total of 1 yellow t-shirt; the rest are all green, blue, red or black.

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:My boring voting story

'

You listen to Coheed and Cambria?

That's interesting.

My wife and I actually had almost no wait to vote yesterday. I left work early in the morning so we could go together, and when we got there we found about a 20 minute long line that we got in... then they called out for people north of 10th street to come forward, and we discovered that all the unlucky schmucks in line were from south of 10th street and we got a free pass right to the voting booths.

The houses south of 10th street in the case of my neighborhood are slightly nicer than the houses north of 10th, so this is the first time it's ever been an advantage to live on the poorer side.

Our ballots were scantrons with pens and lots of booths and two computers to read them (one for republicans, one for democrats... I kid, I kid!), and it moved people through the lines quite quickly. Those suckers who had lines, that is.

It's nice to see Indiana in blue for once. I had a coworker come in grousing this morning about how we now have a president elect who is "liked by our enemies and terrorists" is "friends with Iran" and he noted that a black coworker who was arrived 1 minute later than him (still on time), "she is probably out dancing in the streets". I verbally bitch slapped him after that and he shut up though and returned to silent pouting

Good times.

clikml wrote:
...

I had a coworker come in grousing this morning about how we now have a president elect who is "liked by our enemies and terrorists" is "friends with Iran" ...

Stupid people don't see the benefits of that. AT ALL.

I expected something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

But was disapointed.

Judging__Eagle wrote:

clikml wrote:
...

I had a coworker come in grousing this morning about how we now have a president elect who is "liked by our enemies and terrorists" is "friends with Iran" ...

Stupid people don't see the benefits of that. AT ALL.

The local newspaper's website had a comments thread on their story about the election. The Obama detractors were posting stuff like "Islam takes over America without firing a shot."

I'm sure not all McCain supporters are idiots, but the most vocal ones really are that incredibly stupid.

Judging__Eagle wrote:

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:My boring voting story

'

You listen to Coheed and Cambria?

That's interesting.

I shudder to ask why. But I do like a lot of bands that people don't think fit with what they know about me.

No, it's just interesting to meet other people that listen to Coheed and Cambria.

I only started listening to them b/c my little brother and sister have all of their albums between the two of them. Now it's part of my collection.

Absentminded Wizard wrote:I'm sure not all McCain supporters are idiots, but the most vocal ones really are that incredibly stupid.

Honestly, Obama wasn't doing too hot on that front either. There are smart people on both sides, but most of the people on news site comment threads are complete idiots. Also, you've got a selection bias IRL, so the people you choose to spend time with, who may all be smart, articulate and interesting, all agree with you. The smart, articulate and interesting people who agree with the other guy are all in their own group and are simply shocked by all the idiots they see on the internet who support Obama. The problem is that the people who support one party and people who support the other simply don't talk.

There are, for instance, a large number of faux progressive, male chauvinist, privileged white males who support Obama.

It was very turn-off-ing.

-Crissa

The thing is that it's not just selection bias. Evangelicals favored McCain 3:1. And the Washington Post says that Obama's new wining coalition was:

Washington Post wrote:The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate — young voters, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas.

The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time — older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, Great Plains and Appalachia.

So long as I continue to hang out with educated people and avoid the deep south on days that it isn't being washed away, the majority of people I run into are Obama supporters. Obama supporters are literally more intelligent than McCain supporters.

Unsurprising when you see McCain and co. going off like this:
McCain and Palin on Elitism

-Username17

zeruslord wrote: The smart, articulate and interesting people who agree with the other guy are all in their own group and are simply shocked by all the idiots they see on the internet who support Obama.

It wasn't the idiots on the internet that supported McCain that were concerning. That's expected. It's the idiots who showed up at their events, and even booed McCain's concession speech when he suggested that Obama was an okay guy.

This whole false equivalence that the right tries to push is getting tiring. They really are worse, and it's obvious to anyone whose actually paying attention.

Yea... I unfortunately agree that McCain supporters of this election were the Kerry supporters of the previous.