I hope your polling places have it more together than where I voted this morning.
9 booths, in a phone-booth-sized room, with people becoming so exasperated with the long wait, they left, without voting.
When asked, why so few booths, (you'll like this, or not) the person said, "Because we were expecting a low turnout."
How about this for a solution?
Set up for a large turnout; nobody has to wait, therefore, more people are encouraged to vote.
The federal "observers" didn't know what they were observing, in fact, my wife had to point out that many people weren't getting ballot receipts. Of course, they were prohibited by law, to make suggestions to the people running the circus inside, to have things run more efficiently.
We heard that the ballot scanner had gone down, more than once. The federal observers got on the phone with the support people, who basically said they're swamped and our polling site is on its own.
The electronic ballot scanners left much to be desired. As ballots were inserted, a string of paper ran out the back of the machine, like tickets, from a Skee Ball game, at an arcade.
Words such as, "Defective Ballot", "Please Resubmit" "Overmarked Ballots" didn't do anything to bolster my confidence.
How do you resubmit a ballot that's inside of a locked box?
To say the volunteers were poorly trained, would be too generous a compliment. Untrained, was was I witnessed, first-hand, when a lady came in, asked what she was supposed to do, then apparently couldn't absorb the task at hand.
That didn't prevent her from being assigned to the ballot scanner and misinforming people as to if they should tear their ballot receipt off of the ballot, before inserting.
As it turned out, she had torn ballot receipts off, in advance, which she was handing out like raffle tickets at a Kiwanis fund raising dinner, that had no bearing on which receipts, went with which ballot.
I'd call this a joke, but there's absolutely no humorous punch line, to something so important, being mishandled in such expert fashion.
Good luck for a valid election!
David "The Stunt Engraver" Lavaneri
DGL Engraving
Port Hueneme, CA |
Philadelphia, PA (Really Bensalem)