Some PRIME voter stupid here

[wendyzski]

Even better than the election official punching out the poll worker (worker to the hospital, official charged with battery), described as "a long-standing feud that boiled over"....

Now in Chicago, you can usually choose between touch-screen and paper ballots. I usually choose whatever is available first, so I've used both before. Touch-screen you get a plastic stylus to poke at your choices, so they don't get nasty greasy fingerprints on the screen. Paper ballots get you a particular kind of pen that that you use to "connect" the two ends of an arrow signifying your choices.

In my ward though thankfully not in my precinct, a poll worker handed the plastic stylus to people taking paper ballots. When they asked why it wasn't making any marks, they were told by the worker that it was a "special invisible ink pen" that only the computer could read!

Of course, the machine that reads the ballots spit them back as blank, and the poll worker pressed the manual override to make the machine accept them!

Luckily, someone reported this nonsense fairly early on, and only about 20 "blank" ballots were put through before the Board of Elections troubleshooter got there and figured out what was going on. Sigh.

Comments

[salexa.livejournal.com]

This sounds like more scandal the 20-something AP clerk can use to avoid voting. Sheesh.

Sorry, but

[rillaspins.livejournal.com]

**CACKLE**

[stealthbunny.livejournal.com]

.....

speechless.

Don't they TRAIN these people???

[rose1thorn.livejournal.com]

Seems pretty standard for a Chicago election. I'm surprised it was caught that quickly.

[wifeofset.livejournal.com]

No one is shocked that people in LA can't read but apparently almost 800,000 people who were registered independent and thus given blank party ballots..neglected to fill in the box to indicate what party they were voting for. Yes, that's right. They voted, but forgot the BIG FREAKING BOX at the top to color in for republican or democrat.

Result? 800,000 voided votes

Not sure if it works or not...

[mustang-bex1126.livejournal.com]

I could see this being a good idea if they'd voted for BOTH primaries... but to me the choice itself should give some indication of which party their voting for. ie. if they marked Obama or Hilary, but leave Romney, McCain and the other Clowns alone their vote should be counted, and visa versa.

My gut reaction is that election officials spend far more energy on figuring out ways to toss out votes, than they do on any other part of the processes.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

That is how the Wisconsin primary works: the ballot has candidates for all parties, but votes should only be within one party.

[seamstrix.livejournal.com]

I did the touch screen thing here in Beautiful Exotic Homewood and they just let me touch the screen with my finger. Maybe people in the suburbs have cleaner fingers than people in the city? *blink*blink*

[dragonsblog.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's pretty fabulous. The North Carolina primary isn't until May, so I've got a while before I need to worry about the absentee ballot.

[anjabeth.livejournal.com]

My, oh My! Some people's kids.

*walks away, shaking head*

:)