by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,29,36,3,46],"tags":[135,151,158,126,168],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-government","category-privacy","category-technology","category-voting","tag-design","tag-government","tag-privacy","tag-technology","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}