Election Day
If you plan on voting you should do it today. I went this morning and found out few things:
- the polls opened at 8am not 7,
- most people also thought the polls opened at 7 (or the ~100 people in line make me think so),
- it was cold outside,
- the Diebold Accuvote scanner did not work and there was quite a bit of confusion. I’m hoping there is a hand count because, if not, I’m pretty sure that some people’s votes may not be counted, and I include myself in that group. Who does one contact about this sort of thing? Why is there always so much confusion surrounding elections?
I wont get into Diebold poor name choice, but this is why it is important to have a paper trail. What would happen if I had voted on an electronic only machine? Would I know there was a problem? Would I know that someone could go through and count the votes manually just to make sure? No. I would not.
P.S. Remember the amendments on the back of the NH ballot (I forgot them and had to go back into the booth).
P.P.S. It looks like Vermont has more interesting choices on their ballots.
P.P.P.S. If you are bored, check out the Presidential Speech Tag Cloud. It shows you the major ideas/words in each speech by every president.
Voted this AM. The machine was working correctly, at least it sucked my card in. I didn’t look, but is there an LCD that shows you what it registered your vote as?
There should always be a paper trail.
The presidential speech tag cloud site was awesome. To go along with my recent kick on needing more eduction, it’s interesting to track the word ‘education’ in reference to other words, like ‘war’ and ‘economy’.
T
Comment by tizzom — Tuesday, November 7, 2006 @ 11:23 am
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Pingback by tizzom.com » Blog Archive » Z.Monkey’s Blog » Election Day — Tuesday, November 7, 2006 @ 11:29 am
As you might imagine, election time is interesting around here, but for different reasons than up there. I think it is funny that there are people running for the Senate and the House *in case* we ever get representation. I will say that it was a very clean campaign, didn’t hear and smear ads or ANYTHING
Comment by D14 — Tuesday, November 7, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
Thank god for living in a small town and having to vote on paper ballots…. but to echo your sentiment, this is why we need a paper trail AND voting machines need to be open source.
Comment by nikkiana — Tuesday, November 7, 2006 @ 5:08 pm
The paper ballot is a good start but open source software is a must when it comes to elections. I don’t trust corporate America to make an unbiased voting machine. I mean, what is the point of buying a machine you can’t trust the results from? You would have to recount by hand anyway to making the computers pointless. There needs to be transparency in the whole election process or the process is suspect by default.
Comment by Dumb older bro — Tuesday, November 7, 2006 @ 6:30 pm
D.C. is crazy.
Comment by Z.Monkey — Wednesday, November 8, 2006 @ 6:02 pm