daveo0331's Journal: Adventures in Touchscreen Voting

I voted in the California primary this morning. This was my first time voting with our new touchscreen voting system. I'm not impressed.

It started out normal enough -- I walked into the polling place and signed in. One of the poll workers gave me what looked like a credit card and showed me how to work the machine. This didn't look too hard. I put the card in, got a language selection screen, and picked English...

The only presidential candidate listed was George W. Bush.

As a registered Democrat who got the Democratic sample ballot in the mail, I thought this was a little strange. So I told the poll worker. I also mentioned that I had switched parties a few months ago. Apparently, their records hadn't been updated (even though I got the right sample ballot). No problem, they gave me another card (programmed correctly this time) and I put it in the machine, got the ballot I was expecting, and voted.

Meanwhile, the poll workers were having trouble ejecting the first card from the first machine that had given me the Republican ballot. I can understand having some problems with a new system, but hearing poll workers say "no don't do that or our count will be off" does not inspire confidence in the system. Eventually they got the card out. Hopefully the count won't be off.

Ultimately, I got to cast my vote, and I gave the card back to the poll worker. They filled out some kind of form for an "exception" based on my party registration being wrong.

Did I ever get any kind of paper reciept or other hardcopy record of who I voted for? Of course not.