Well, got to admit this election was an "education" of sorts. When I got to the precinct, there was a line reaching practically to the outside and serpentining in the gym where the voting was occurring. You had to go to one door to pick up your ballot receipt then go get in this long line. I wondered what was going on since I've been voting in this state since 1970 and never saw anything close to this. I have a partial answer. First, the voting machine was breaking down. Which was a first for me in this precinct since we went to this kind of counting in the Joan Growe years. Second, they had one elderly lady handing out the ballots, explaining how the senatorial vote was to be handled,AND writing sequential numbers on the receipts. She was complaining that she couldn't keep up with the writing and she tried to do several while I stood there waiting for my ballot. She seemed to feel she had to put them on a spike as she wrote the numbers on them. She tried to push several at once on the spike, but she hadn't the hand strength to do it. Then she found a numbered receipt that hadn't been put on where it belonged in the numerical order. I can't tell if this was her own invented procedure, but it certainly was a bottle neck in the whole thing. Plus, the had about a half dozen people younger and stronger than she was.
This whole voting procedure was full of novelties with no advance notice. As a result, newcomers came in and stood in the long line for a while before someone told them they had to have a receipt. Most got disgruntled but went ahead and voted anyway. One old guy came in with a cane and said there was no way he could stand that long in a line. One discouraged vote gone this year. I don't know how many went away mmediately on seeing the line. One could criticize their attitude, but the thing to remember is that in the Cooper neighborhood, we don't HAVE this kind of experience with voting. Prior to this year, we had admirable efficiency. The problem had to be an imposed one because the same judges do it every time. Wellstone's death made a problem, but it didn't cause all this. A number of ballots in this precinct did NOT get electronically counted. People had waited 45 minutes to make the critical step, and then the machine wouldnt work (can you say "Florida"?) I swore that once I marked my ballot, I'd wait all day to get it machine-counted. I'm not that old yet, and I arranged a day off for the election because I kinda smelled trouble coming. I didn't want to worry about getting to work in this kind of year. I genuinely believe there WILL be some lawsuits on this election day. I hope so. I think there is fishy stuff going on. I pointed a camera at one of the ladies fiddling with the machine and she got VERY nervous. I think it is good for people who handle your ballot to be nervous, to believe the whole world will see it if they are doing something wrong. In fact, I wish there was a law that there had to be VIDEOTAPE at every polling place. They probably wouldnt catch any wrongdoing because who would screw with the election with a camera rolling? ===== Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood Minneapolis ------------- Paul Wellstone: Best friend Minneapolis ever had in Washington. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:mpls@;mnforum.org Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
