Excited about my role in our country's most important constituent responsibility, I made sure I was up early last Tuesday to be one of the first in line to vote at my local polling place. Sure, I also had other things to accomplish, such as a couple of workouts and packing before an international trip, but I wanted to be sure and add my vote to the tally with as little issue as possible.
What transpired was an amazing display of late 1980s technology being run by a crew that clearly had neither been been trained adequately, nor had they invested a few extra minutes (or dollars) to make the voting experience something better than, say, what I'd find in a third world country.
I know, I'm spoiled by having worked in technology all my career since 1986, and even worse, having worked in and around the document imaging industry since the late 1980s. This is the technology area that delivered OCR, or optical character recognition, and OMR, or optical mark sensing. As anyone that has ever taken an SAT or standardized test can attest, you fill in the circles with your writing implement and the marks, which have a pretty high tolerance to coloring outside the lines, are recorded and counted to determine scores. So, my expectations, as well as those of most people, would naturally be fairly high relative to the ability of a machine to record a vote signified by a colored dot on a page.
Expectations undelivered upon.
The first indication things were awry was the disorganization of the helpers right from the start. Now, I understand these are volunteers giving their time for free (and maybe some doughnuts), but one would have thought they'd be ready for voters eager to make their mark (pun intended). But unknown districts started panic; complicated addresses caused lengthy searches through the "books of addresses"; and then we had the finicky voting machines to contend with.
I filled out my ballot sheet, which had been torn out of a book by a volunteer that had to record which ballot (ordinally from the book) was mine. I walked to the "cubbies" next to the voting machine, actually a table with little dividers on it, to fill out my ballot. As I was doing so, some dude walked up, looked over my shoulder, and asked to borrow the other pen that was there. Not very private. Upon completing my ballot, I handed it to the volunteer whose job it was to have the ballot scanned in the "voting machine" (i.e., scanner and ballot collector). He could see it as he put it into the scanner's opening. TWO TIMES it failed to register my votes, and TWO TIMES he looked at my ballot, took it out, held it up, looked at it again, and tried to rescan. Are you kidding me? I really don't care who knows who I voted for (straight democratic this time), but I'm sure that others do, and beyond that, it isn't right!
The things that bugged me were:
- total lack of privacy
- total lack of any serious technology applied to this process
- the inability of anyone to take what is a waste of time process wise and move it on-line. Technically, there is NO REASON why this could not be done. However, we seem to have made very little improvement over the lever-based system used just four years ago (ka-CHUNK), and we're still relying upon fallible humans to manage all of this. I could operate a small factory from my smartphone -- but I can't vote with it.
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