Okay, I was wrong about the whole late night thing, but I assumed that the problems were only with getting people to vote, not with collecting the votes. What is strange about the problem is that collecting everything should be even easier than ever—collecting cards is easier than collecting boxes from all of the precincts.
But don’t even think about bringing back Votamatics
Punch Cards are outdated technology–don’t believe me–how many out there have ever used a card for computer programming? Yeah, and we were still using them for counting votes. They disenfranchised poor voters at higher rates than any of the newer technology and were just as vulnerable to tampering.
I’m pretty confident David Orr will get this right by the General Election, but not so much with the City where election judges weren’t even given video training. Hands on training should be mandatory, but that also means those out there should sign up to be judges.
Personally, I’m on the Citizen Audit Panel in Saint Louis City. So I’ll report back on how their first election goes (it’s a muni election so it’ll be a good test.
I like to think of punch cards as ‘senior-stoppers’ though really anyone human would have difficulties with them. Whoever came up with them in the first place ought to be consigned to the Democracy Hall of Shame.
Good riddance!
When I worked at operations at Loyola U by the lakeside during the late 80’s we still had the occasional nostalgic come in with his cards to get read. Still had a card reader that would read them too. Just lucky I never dropped a deck though. Our card sorter was sitting out in the hallway as a conversation/museum piece.
ArchPundit, I’ve been an election judge in the city of Chicago for 19 years. Not once in all of that time (using the old punch card system) did we have any of the problems experienced in Florida in 2000. No pregnant chads. No dimpled chads. Very few equipment problems.
I believe that conscientious election judges who will take a defective piece of equipment out of service if necessary and give proper instructions to voters go a long way towards eliminating problems like those.
That having been said, I agree with you. I was in the thick of things for 17 grueling hours in Chicago last Tuesday. Our precinct shared quarters with two others. We had one touchscreen unit and three optical mark readers. The touchscreen was out of commission for the first eight hours of the day.
But the mark readers performed beautifully, the marked ballots were easier to read and fill out than the old punch card system, and the system cleared up irritations that had plagued us for years with the old system.
I’m a skeptic on the touchscreen system (and the word on the street was that it would be scrapped) but I’m enthusiastic about the ease, speed, and accuracy of the optimal mark readers.
BTW mark readers are an old technology, too: they’ve been in use for at least 35 years.