Early Voting Begins Today

9 thoughts on “Early Voting Begins Today”

1. Don’t trust them new fangled electronic voting machines.

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2. Wait a sec… weren’t we all gonna wait for 12 days before the election?  So we can know who we’re really voting for?  Doesn’t anyone remember that?  Or perhaps that “emergency” rule was repealed when I wasn’t paying attention…

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   1. It was 18 days, which would have been last Friday.

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3. So that ship has sailed…..the ship of fools, that is. What we see on the ballot is what there is…..unless Gi-Gi gets the urge to emergency rule make again!

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4. I went down for early voting today at the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s office, 200 S. Cascade in Colorado Springs around 11:30.  With this being the first day, I was expecting things to be in disarray but everything actually appeared to be running very smoothly. 

   During a short wait in line, a gentleman was there demonstrating the new touchscreen machines.  It looked very simple.  After forking over my driver’s license, verifying my address, and signing a form, someone programmed a smart card to be used in the machine.  I was left wondering if I was going to get to the machine and find that it wasn’t programmed correctly or something.

   The card and my form were passed along to another official and I was told to have a seat until my name was called.  During another short wait, I observed others using the machines, including some older people.  During this brief wait, I observed one or two people asking for assistance with their machines, but it didn’t appear to be anything catastrophic.  I was called up and an official helped me insert my card into the machine and she verified that it came up with the correct precinct.  When the ballot came up, the display said page 1 of 8. OMG.  Trust me, you better know what you’re voting for when you go in.  You don’t have time to read the ballot, figure out what the issue means, and try to figure out how to work this @#$% machine at the same time.

   Now let me just say that I am very computer literate.  I have a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.  If I can handle an old VAX, I should be able to handle this.  But I didn’t like this machine.  I found it somewhat confusing.  I think the user interface was not as good as it could have been.  Making my choices was pretty easy.  What I really didn’t like was the summary screen.

   First of all, when I pressed the button to view the summary, it said something about preparing the summary and displayed a progress bar much like Windows does.  I was waiting for the machine to give me the bluescreen of death like Windows but it didn’t.  I really didn’t like the format of the summary screen.  It was three columns wide and I had to page down to see the whole thing.  The first column had the candidates and scrolled down off the screen, the second started in the middle of the amendments, and the third started off in the middle of the referendums.  It would have been so much easier if they had used only single lines and let me scroll down through those and just see how I voted on everything in order… 38, 39, 40, etc.  I also didn’t like that the summary did not display the party affiliation for each candidate, only their name.

   Then I printed a paper record of the ballot, one page at a time and watched it scroll by in the window.  That part was pretty ok because it was all line-by-line there and it was much easier to read.  Apparently at that point you still have the option to reject the ballot if you see something that’s not right.  The last line was very confusing because it said “[ ] Vote Not Cast” and I assume that it was cast because there was no X in the box.

   So this very computer literate person *thinks* he got all of the boxes marked correctly and *thinks* his ballot will probably get counted.  If you’re elderly or have never used a computer, may God have mercy on your soul.

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   1. I voted with a machine during the primary.  As a software developer for the last 15 years, I also assumed it should have been easy.  I ended up feeling the same.  I *think* my vote was counted the way I intended, but it left me confused.  I will head down to the El Paso Clerk and Recorder tomorrow and see what it looks like there.

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   2. who is the manufacturer of the machines in El Paso Cty?

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5. I voted early today at one of the JeffCo locations and had no problem.  The machine was one of those iVoting or whatever they’re called.  Anyway, the screens were easy to read and understand, and there were two people who’s only job was to help people.  So I say kudos to the JeffCO people for being on top of things.  Though they said JeffCo doesn’t give out “I Voted” stickers.  I wonder why?

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