I didn’t keep a detailed journal of yesterday’s primary election so I won’t post a pseudo-live-blog as I have in previous elections. Yesterday was an extremely rough day: I worked a solid 17 hours as an election judge with only one meal (that was all I had time for) and only minimal breaks during the entire period. We handled our precinct with only three election judges (roughly half the normal complement). This morning I can barely walk (heck, I can barely stand). I’m hoarse and exhausted. I can only imagine how I’d feel if we’d had the normal turnout for a primary election let alone the normal turnout for a general election.
Yesterday’s turnout was low. The expected turnout for the precinct in which I work for a primary election is roughly 50% of the registered voters. Yesterday the turnout was 40%. I haven’t been able to find out what the citywide turnout was yet but experience would suggest a citywide turnout of roughly 30%. That’s pathetic and stupid. It’s pathetic that so few of my fellow-citizens express any interest in their rights as citizens or participating in the democratic process. It’s stupid because the realities of politics in Chicago are that the candidates that win the primary go on to win the general election.
The results continue to trickle in with roughly 87% of the votes counted as of this writing. Citywide the entire election process was marred by problems, mostly equipment problems. Yesterday we using three new pieces of equipment for the very first time. Our polling place had one touchscreen electronic voting machine, shared among the three precincts that share the facility. The device was out of commission for the first eight hours of voting. The technician from Election Central who finally showed up to check the problem out determined that the problem was caused by a cockpit error by the worker downtown who prepped the gear. The technicain BTW was barely a technician at all—basically a clerk-typist with a very small amount of familiarity with the equipment. The problem, as it turned out, was one I had diagnosed and which I could very easily have corrected myself if I had a mind to, which I didn’t—I had no interest in accepting liability for damaging a piece of city equipment.
Word on the street is that the touchscreens will not be used in the general election. I certainly hope that’s the case.
The other piece of equipment that we had problems with was something called the vote activator unit. It’s a companion piece for the touchscreen. Some of the problems were due to cockpit errors on the part of election judges working in a precinct we were sharing quarters with. Another problem was caused by a cockpit error by a downtown worker. I verified that his particular problem was shared by all three of the voice activator units in use at the polling place and corrected it with a little assistance from Election Central over the phone. That particular error cost us a full two hours delay in completing the tallying of the votes at the end of the day (when we’re in no mood whatever to put up with equipment problems).
The third piece of equipment, the optical scanner for the hand-marked ballots, performed beautifully and I have to admit that I’m very fond of it. It’s actually an improvement over the old punchcard readers that it replaces—it solved a number of problems we’d had over the years. But the new method takes longer at the end of the day and introduced more irregularities than the old punchcard system. This is where an irrational fear of chads has brought us.
For those who (like Glenn Reynolds) believe that we should return to a completely manual system of recording and tabulating votes, I believe that you owe it to yourself and your community to volunteer your own time as an election judge before expressing yourself. You simply don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. A completely manual system will be significantly more expensive and more ridden by error and outright fraud than a manual-automated hybrid system.
A better system for dealing with problems with the voting, tabulation, and reporting process needs to be put into place. Due to the many equipment problems we had to call the Election Central support line four times in the course of the day. I can only imagine the problems that precincts with less capable or conscientious election judges might have had. Each time we called it took us a full twenty minutes to reach someone either on hold or getting a busy signal.
Here’s what should happen. Each precinct should have a “panic button†i.e. a procedure for transmitting the problem to an automated system. The equipment we have in place in the polling places already has the raw capability for doing this. Once a problem request has come from a precinct someone from Election Central should get back to the precinct—we shouldn’t have to wait for someone to pick up the phone. This system would have the benefits of freeing the volunteer workers at the polling places for the many tasks they need to perform other than trying to reach someone at Election Central and it would also provide an automated log of problem reports.
As presently constituted Election Central has a severe problem of perverse incentives or moral hazard. The workers there aren’t volunteers: they’re paid employees and are unionized. The more problems there are in the field, the more necessary they are and the greater the likelihood of receiving overtime pay. Plus, of course, they have the attitude problems which are universal in bureaucrats.
So here are my prescriptions for reforming the election process. First, dump the touchscreens. They are not ready for primetime. Keep the optical scanners. Go back to the old system of tabulating and reporting results. Reform and streamline the problem reporting process. And, if Chicago will be using higher tech equipment either get some real technicians—not the faux technicians you’re using now—or deputize willing election judges who have the inclination, training, and experience to do the job do it themselves.
We’re already bringing our own food, materials, extension cords for the various pieces of equipment we need to use, and providing for xerography for the forms that are missing from our supplies ourselves. We may as well maintain the equipment, too.
UPDATE: Shay tells us about her own experience voting in the primary from the other side of the coin as it were over at Dean’s World. Apparently, it looked a lot worse to us who were in the trenches during the election than it did to our customers. Good.
