Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I voted on Tuesday using a paper ballot where I filled an oval with ink to register my vote. This removed one computer from the voting system. I think that was a good thing.

I voted on Tuesday. The voting place near my home in Northern Virginia used paper ballots. This felt a bit strange at first, but they gave me a single piece of paper and asked me to go stand in front of a little table that had vertical sides on it so that no one could see where I marked the paper. The instructions asked me to fill in an oval next to my choice with the pen provided. We only had five things to vote on here – four elected offices and one funding matter – so it was pretty simple and quick.

After filling in the little ovals, I looked around for a place to put my piece of paper. A woman stood at the end of the school gym pointing to a machine next to her. I fed the piece of paper into the machine, the machine “took” it, and a motor pulled it in. I guess that the machine detected which ovals I had filled.

As a side note, the machine did look at lot like a paper shredder. I trust that it was a ballot reader and not a paper shredder.

We did not use Windows 7-powered laptop computers on the voting tables. That was a relief. I never understood how someone thought it a good idea to use a computer system built for millions of users to run thousands of different applications as a hyper-secure, private, single-user, and single-application system. But then again there are many things that government employees do that I have never understood.

Perhaps we have returned to the paper ballot for the next few elections. Maybe one day, someone will write software for a voting machine. They will start with nothing and write the software for voting and for nothing else. There seems to be a market for this.

Then again, my paper ballot was read by a computer and that computer passed data to another computer and that computer counted the votes and that computer passed data to another computer and …