Hello everyone. Yesterday I was a poll worker in my precinct in Santa Barbara California. We talk so much about theory on this list, I'd like to talk about voting in action for a bit.
I was very pleased with the AccuVote machines that we use. We have optically read ballots where voters simply fill in ovals. If the machine detects an over-vote the ballot is rejected and the voter receives a new ballot. If we should ever have a race as close as Florida's we might have to worry about under-votes, but not over-votes. This isn't true in every county, but a ballot initiative passed to fund the purchase of better voting machines in counties that need them. (According to one poll worker SB County used to have the punch-card machines, but those machines were sold to Florida several years ago. I don't know if the story is true, but it was not presented as a joke!) The potential for rigging the election is quite small. At the beginning of the day the machine gives a printout of the totals for each candidate, and we verify that it's zero, so even if somebody tried to run ballots through it in advance it would be detected. You can't reprogram the machine at the polls. I don't recall if the printout was time-stamped (I wasn't in charge of the machine) but if there's no clock in the machine it would be even more difficult to rig the election, because you couldn't program the machine to give a zero total in the morning, but a rigged total in the evening. The voter lists were well-maintained. We issued only 3 provisional ballots, and those were for people who lost their absentee ballots. We don't check ID (against the law) but since we keep track of who already voted (we have a list of all registered voters) anybody posing as another voter would be detected if the actual person tried to vote that same day. Since we get signatures from each voter and the county has a signature on file with the voter registration the fraud would be detected in due time. I don't know enough about the voter registration procedures to assert that they are immune to fraud, but if they are as careful as the election day procedures I have confidence in the process. The weakest link in the process is low voter turnout. All of our procedures are pointless when less than 15% of the precinct even cares enough to vote or request an absentee ballot. That is sad when you think of how many people today would sacrifice a great deal to vote (and how many already have in the past). The head of our precinct is an Army Reservist who said that (a) he doesn't jump out of planes for the money, and he doesn't work the polls for money either and (b) if you can get thousands of people to protest something why can't you get them to vote? Also, the low voter turnout is the greatest window for fraud as long as the laws forbid checking ID. If hardly anybody votes, posers are unlikely to be caught since the odds are slim that they person they impersonated will show up. I personally see little harm in checking ID, and I would encourage the lawmakers to consider it, but that's a separate issue. Finally, to get back to election methods, the AccuVote machine could easily accomodate Approval Voting. In one county race (electing party officials for the county, since it's a partisan primary) I had the option of picking up to three candidates out of eight or so. I'm sure it could be programmed to handle up to eight of eight. I encourage everybody hear to vote whenever there are elections in your area, and volunteer at the polls. We can discuss the best way to resolve cyclic ambiguities until our fingers fall off from typing, but somebody still has to keep the polls running. Alex Small
