Jolly Rancher on Nostr: Wife and i worked polls off and on since we moved here ~25 years ago. Paper pollbooks ...
Wife and i worked polls off and on since we moved here ~25 years ago. Paper pollbooks were useful when everyone was required to vote in their home precinct. A little awkward to look up everyone in a big stack of fanfold computer printout, but it worked. The pollbook is certainly the best use of modern computer technology -- a notebook computer can contain the names of everyone in the county.
We worked one all-paper election back around 2004 or so. We live in a messy area for elections, on the county line where boundaries for school, utility, hospital, and other districts overlap in various ways. I can't remember what the issue was, but the election only involved a few precincts -- our own precinct was not one of them. So that was an interesting experience. Maybe 100 or 200 voters came in all day, most people did not know, or care, that there was an election. We had them counted, boxed, sealed, and back to the County Clerk in less than an hour after polls closed. There were no poll-watchers.
Since then, they've all been run by machines. It's pretty opaque, poll workers don't have much insight. Anyone in the county can vote at any polling place, so a paper pollbook would be impossible. Ballots were replaced by these clunky touch-screen e-slates that resembled obsolete game pads... There was one time we had someone come out and wanted to "poll-watch" after 7 PM as we were packing up the machines. It was a candidate for City Council, we were not sure what she was looking for. One of the few times we had to invoke our authority as judges for a day, to send her away. It took a while to pack and seal the machines, print any required tapes, and haul the 'JBC' tally-box and other materials in to the collection point, and we just wanted to go home.
If there's any cheating going on in this county, my guess is that it's with bond issues, which always seem to miraculously pass, regardless of the mood of the voters. If the vote is a contest, a candidate can demand an audit, but the bond issue just sits there all dumb and happy in the 'yes' column.
We worked one all-paper election back around 2004 or so. We live in a messy area for elections, on the county line where boundaries for school, utility, hospital, and other districts overlap in various ways. I can't remember what the issue was, but the election only involved a few precincts -- our own precinct was not one of them. So that was an interesting experience. Maybe 100 or 200 voters came in all day, most people did not know, or care, that there was an election. We had them counted, boxed, sealed, and back to the County Clerk in less than an hour after polls closed. There were no poll-watchers.
Since then, they've all been run by machines. It's pretty opaque, poll workers don't have much insight. Anyone in the county can vote at any polling place, so a paper pollbook would be impossible. Ballots were replaced by these clunky touch-screen e-slates that resembled obsolete game pads... There was one time we had someone come out and wanted to "poll-watch" after 7 PM as we were packing up the machines. It was a candidate for City Council, we were not sure what she was looking for. One of the few times we had to invoke our authority as judges for a day, to send her away. It took a while to pack and seal the machines, print any required tapes, and haul the 'JBC' tally-box and other materials in to the collection point, and we just wanted to go home.
If there's any cheating going on in this county, my guess is that it's with bond issues, which always seem to miraculously pass, regardless of the mood of the voters. If the vote is a contest, a candidate can demand an audit, but the bond issue just sits there all dumb and happy in the 'yes' column.