Not Quite a Blog

[cross-posted to the OurVoteLive blog]

I'm going to try and do today what I didn't have time to do yesterday: some discussion of voting machine and voting technology incidents. Since I was based out of OVL's Simpson Thatcher call center in NYC, I'll first talk about the main states we covered: New Jersey and Michigan.

New Jersey - Early on we were getting tons of reports about broken machines and emergency ballots. In a number of cases poll workers were confused and were offering provisional ballots instead of emergency ballots. In follow-up on a few cases, this was simply poll workers issuing emergency ballots and having voters place them in provisional envelopes without asking the voters to fill out the provisional information (affidavit?). Places we followed up with further here ensured us that they were no longer using the provisional envelopes past the mid-morning. Unfortunately, some of these polling places will undoubtedly run out of emergency ballots by the end of the day. Two other consistent problems with the AVC Advantages are "premature voters" and "fleeing voters". In these cases voters either: 1) report accidentally casting their ballot -- pressing the "VOTE" button -- after making only a few selections on the ballot (casting an incomplete ballot) and 2) report either entering a booth with an uncast ballot on it or realizing later that they neglected to cast their ballot. A few voters reported what might be broken buttons or dead lights on the Advantage... they report having pushed a button next to their candidate of choice and the button not lighting up. It's hard to tell here if the button is broken -- vote not registered or cast -- or the light is broken -- vote cast but not apparent.

Michigan - The big story in Michigan was that optical scanners were breaking down en masse. I have a feeling this is related to the fact that some MI jurisdictions have not been able to perform preventive maintenance on their machines since they were purchased three years ago due to contractual warranty restrictions (see this letter to EAC from the Oakland County, MI Clerk: http://tinyurl.com/64hrmn). Most of the MI reports concerned broken, dysfunctional or nonfunctional optical scanners. Some voters were surprised that they have to cast their ballots into auxiliary bins or ballot boxes instead of the scanner; some refuse to do so and wait, causing very long lines. The other story in MI is a lack or shortage of privacy sleeves. These are essentially large manila folders and it appears that voters have to wait in line with their ballot in a privacy sleeve before casting their vote, thus the shortage given long lines.

More later...