I got a call this morning from a voter who went into her polling place, filled out the form for a democratic ballot, was given the card and when she popped it into the machine, a republican ballot appeared. She was given the correct card upon request, but this is troubling because not everyone would ask. It is also ironic because the voter in question is Cox's field coordinator in Middle Georgia. How ironic.
In a separate issue at the same polling place, a voter says that Beth Perera who is running for the House in 136 appeared on his ballot. Great, except that the voters lives in 137. The elections supervisor says that there is no way this happened. So, what the answer here?
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Voting Issues in Macon
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More than likely its a coding error on behalf of the poll worker that encoded the voter's card. Most precincts have more than one ballot option depending on their congressional/senate/house/county com./school board ballot combo.
Once the voter recognizes this, he/she can have this corrected. In fact, it can be corrected at any point up until the boter presses the "vote" button. Once that button is pushed, there is no return.
It's the same sort of problem under the old system where the voter gets sent to the wrong booth with the wrong ballot combo. The unfortunate thing is, a lot of voters don't know the difference or choose not to say anything.
I hate to throw off on poll workers and voters. But most of these problems are human errors. The good news is they are correctable. Machine errors like ones with calibration can be fixed by simply closing that machine down until the county tech can look at it and have the voter vote on another machine. Or as a last resort, they could always vote a "provisional" paper ballot I suppose.
I worked in this stuff for 11 years until 2003. I've seen just about everything. And just about anything is correctable until you cast your ballot.
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