Early voting started in North Carolina this past week and my wife and I wanted to take advantage of it. I am glad we did.
From what I understand from the BOE workers, local BOE databases were swapped over to a single state-wide database in Raleigh this past spring. That kind of database merger sweeps in all the problems you can possibly imagine. I was listed as inactive, even though they have me voting every two years since, like, forever. And my wife's data was also wonky - they still had her maiden name, we have been married for 13 years. The main problem stemmed, I think, from the 'geoloc' database. Our residence is on Brookstone Court - least that is what the street sign says. Nothing could be changed with our registration until we figured out Raleigh thought we lived on Brookstone DRIVE. Just that basic error locked up everything.
That was not the only problem. When we arrived at the poll, the servers in Raleigh crashed and killed everything including our local voting terminals. As I understand it, it was a state-wide outage. It only lasted for about 15 minutes, but still - not a confidence builder.
Now we can chat about our voting computers. Got whiskey?
It is now the law in North Carolina to have a paper backup of all voting records. The model we used were iVotronic terminals. The interface was well laid out, easy to read and easy to use. The side of the machine has a box that contains the paper voting record. It spools up and lists your votes, then prints a summary THEN prints off a series of bar codes that also records your vote - that with the server record is triple redundancy. It still isn't perfect, but voting was a WHOLE lot better than the pieces of shit terminals we had for 2004 - those were Diebold.
My wife had a more difficult time, she some how entered "audio voting" mode and well, it needed to be re-set.
With all of that, if your state has early voting, FOR THE LOVE OF <insert deity name here> VOTE EARLY! There are problems with the system and they can be reduced if we take advantage of the time we have before the election to fix them. The pressure will be on Nov. 7th and our election system will be under extreme strain. Please, please, please vote now if you can.
I do also want to thank the BOE staff and poll workers. They were ALL amazing, very patient and helpful. If anything, they are on the ass-end of computerized voting.