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Election Day
A thread specifically for those who took the time to vote today. Share your experiences. If you want to share, who did you vote for? Why? What is the general feeling ‘on the street’ now election day has arrived.
19 Responses to “Election Day”
I can’t say it better than THIS
I voted at 7:15 am, polls opened at 7:00
touch screen w/paper trail
I was voter #37 in my district
(8000 total population in 4 districts)
Should be a large turnout since we have marriage referendum and death penalty referendum on the ballot.
My vote?
Straight Dem ticket
No (against defining marriage as one man one woman)
No (against reinstating the death penalty)
LOL. good to know you voted BYG. That is, after all, the most important thing, at least so people say.
STW: so you were confident in using the touch screen?
On the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert told his audience to remember when they voting a candidate with a (D) next to his name, meant (Don’t) vote for this candidate. Let me just say that I (Disobeyed) his advice. Short lines, no snafus, and I am still wearing my sticker. Have to agree 100% with BYG’s graphic—Republicans give me my country back! The Republicans have wallowed in their own slime and deserve to at least lose the House.
LOL indeed!!
Thanks for paying attention.
I podcasted my voting experience today in a 9 minute audio episode. Smooth sailing in Metrowest Massachusetts, although one of the political partisans really confused me with his idea about what Proposition 2 was about!
If you’d like to give a listen, it’s episode 397.
Chris
I voted with the touch screen Diebold machine and it went off without a hitch, as it always has. I’m not sure why some states neglect to train their poll workers on the new equipment. We’ve never had a problem with our machines.
That said, I wish we still used the paper ballots and scanatron machines. The lack of a paper trail bothers me a bit, though without physical security of the voting machines and ballots you have the possibility of fraud with any system. I’m more concerned with a faulty chip or something losing a whole precinct’s data.
BYG- Because of your voting pattern and attractive graphic, I have forgiven you for predicting that Michael Steele will win in Maryland (I am a big Cardin fan), LOL!
I’ve been by three voting areas in Ohio so far. Once to vote myself, once because the school was a voting area, and a third time at a municipal building. Pretty varied in terms of political areas.
Doesn’t look bad so far from my sample. None were reporting the common paper jams from two years ago, and the software means that it’s very hard to make an error (and even if there’s a significant calibration issue, you’re pretty aware of it).
It’ll get uglier as time goes on, of course. The 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM rush is always ugly, since most people vote at this time and the polls are never really ready for it. I don’t know why they close so early and take place on a weekday myself, but I assume it’s a tradition thing.
Interestingly, no exit polls at any of the locations.
I kinda wish some of the dogcatcher races would have more information available on the candidates; I didn’t even really know who was running for X board position, nevermind their ranks, so I had to skip a couple.
At least in the three I’ve seen, there’s a paper trail (which would probably be easier to forge than the electronic one), so the old people probably feel better.
As to vote security… I figure anyone that can code a chip to cheat, and do so invisibly, and rewrite itself to look ‘fair’, and do it to the point where our technology (which can read through even the gold standard of “5-9s”, or five series of nine random wipes of a hard drive) can’t read the old code…
Well, making a big stack of filled-out fake paper ballots seems far to easy by comparision.
Voted in Waco today. Was fast, easy and painless.
Crappy turnout at the local polling place, but its a college, so most of these future draftees couldn’t be bothered to put their bongs down long enough to vote I guess.
They’ll learn soon enough.
Is that Guttman’s algorithm? I thought you needed an electron microscope, and even then you can’t get it all.
Is there anyway at all to get rid of it all short of melting the HD?
Guttmans paper said 4-5 wipes was just as good as 40 short of an electron microsope.
Whats the real deal, and how do you know?
Well Michael, I think in my area where the choices are an optically scanned paper ballot which gives you a confirmation that you voted and a touch screen that when you finish your choices asks for confirmation, then prints your vote and it scrolls through a window so you see that it does indeed show how you voted the chances that my vote was recorded accurately and will be counted correctly are approximately equal with either method.
STV; yup good point.
Chicago suburb this morning. I could either wait for “the screen” to be available or vote with a paper ballot, so I went with the paper.
No line, there hardly ever is, it’s a nice suburb. Different kind of paper ballot–they gave me a “magic pen.”
I miss the old punch ballots. In spite of the problems in Florida in 2000, they’re still better than the mishmash we have now.
Kim Ritter–
I’m glad to be back on your good side!!
BTW, the blog with the graphic is from Maryland. He covers some some stuff about the local politics there, in case you’re from his neighborhood.
The Shark said:
Snarkerific! I’m still laughing!
By absentee ballot. For a balanced government, i.e. a Democratic Congress.
Snarky, there’s some technology available to the United States government that you and I can’t talk about.
Five nines is the standard the military used to use for low classified systems, with higher classified systems being destroyed. To be honest, it’s overkill, by an extreme value, since very few folk can or would want to read it this way. The official DoD standard is only three or seven passes now depend on situation, although they’ve also begun to destroy most drives now instead. Gutmann’s method is a method ocassionally used by paranoids who one way of fufilling five nines-like protection with fewer writes, and is likewise overkill.
At least according to Gutmann, the DoD, and most foriegn agencies, a couple passes of random noise is enough to prevent normal access. Groups with deep pockets, such as the United States, are probably not nearly as limited. With the correct tools there’s always a way.
Burning a disk with thermite, or taking the disks out of the hard drive and scrapping them across asphalt, are pretty assuredly going to make the information non-viable, but either case doesn’t really work for a voting booth.
The NVRAM media most likely to be used to house the system’s structures adds some interesting difficulties as well that aren’t really well understood by today’s computer security experts (similar to USB drives), but we do know there has been successes with “brute forcing” the system into showing details about previous status.
Of course, all of these methods would be highly suspect and very, very dangerous, particularly when we’re talking hundreds of machines that would need to contain altered code. In addition, there would be some strange structural artifacts of such a system that would give it away (a secondary NVRAM or ROM chip that would have no use in a normal system, for example).
I had to insert my ballot about 9 times before it finally got *read* today. That’s pretty minor in my book, I know that the machines they use up here are pretty picky about nicks and bends in the ballots.
I was very pleased to see a long line at my polling place this morning. Usually I walk right in a vote with no waiting. The poll workers said they were a lot busier than usual. That made me feel really good.
For the first time in my life, I voted straight dem and I’ve been voting for a very long time.