Well, I fulfilled my civic duty this morning, for all the good it will do. Election results in Utah are highly predictable, not to mention one-sided, and if you happen to be on the, ahem, minority side — which I am, if you haven’t figured that out by now — voting tends to feel like an exercise in futility. Still, you’ve got no room to bitch if you don’t vote, right? And my three loyal readers all know how much I like bitchin’, so…
My actual voting experience went much more smoothly than I anticipated. I’ve been somewhat apprehensive about these fancy new computerized voting machines with their new-fangled touch-screens and all. I don’t trust them, to be honest; I worry about them being hacked or secretly programmed to produce a particular outcome. It’s all too easy to imagine my vote simply vanishing into the aether of cyberspace, or else being transmogrified into a vote for those other guys. I’ve also wondered what happens if the machine has a problem, and the only people available to try and fix it are the typical polling-station volunteers who tend to be so old that they still think color TV is a passing fad. And for today’s election, at least, I worried that the lines would be terrible because the machines are new and a lot of people would be slowed down by the learning curve.
To my surprise, however, the lines moved quickly, the machines struck me as very user-friendly — even my parents, to whom e-mail remains a deep and unfathomable mystery, had no problems figuring them out — and my concerns about security were somewhat mollified by a back-up system that generates an actual paper ballot. (If you haven’t seen the voting machines yet, your votes are recorded on a paper roll similar to a cash register receipt. The paper stays inside the machine, presumably for security reasons, but it passes through a little window so you can review it and make any changes before you hit the “Cast Ballot” button.) I’m still generally suspicious of the new machines and would prefer that we return to tried-and-true paper-balloting methods, but the back-up helped me to rachet down my paranoia a notch or two.
I have seen reports of local problems with the machines, but in my precinct, at least, everything was fine. The biggest problem I had was finding my polling place, because it seems to change every other election. One year, it’s held at my old elementary school; the next, it’s at the new elementary school that was built a decade or so back. This year, it was back at the old school, but my parents and I thought it was still at the new one, so we wasted a good 15 minutes driving around town. (We went to vote at the same time, but travelled in separate cars so I could go to work afterwards.) I suspect we looked like we were re-enacting the climax from the original Pink Panther movie, that farcical sequence where half-a-dozen different cars keep whizzing through a quiet village center from different directions.
