Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Training for September 19, 2006 primary

For many years, I worked at the polls for King County, leading a team of poll judges in ensuring people got their ballots according to the rules. It was pretty straightforward stuff, most of the time, as long as we were very picky according to the details. As I clean out back files, I came across this training notification. I believe this is the first time we had to use those idiotic electronic voting machines, which were some of the most amazingly badly (and yet evidently expensively) designed gadgets I had ever seen. Why they didn't hook up a standard laptop to a standard printer to output a standard paper ballot to be cast in the standard way, I'll never know - except of course that it would have been easy to audit and to produce. But we didn't make the rules; our job was to execute them, and the training helped. I'm going to try scheduling this blog post for 9/19/2006 and see where it pops up in the blog; I'm actually posting it on 3/1/2013.