I've just returned from early voting near my home in central Austin. While I was voting, a very strange thing happened.
Just to be clear, I've never voted "straight ticket" anything. In the long-ago days, when paper ballots were still the norm, there was a rumor that straight-ticket ballots were compiled after the other ballots were counted, and thus more liable to be fiddled with. Probably just an urban legend, but hey, this is the state where the dead possibly rose from their graves in Alice, Texas (Ballot Box 13) to put "Landslide Lyndon" into office for the first time.
So I was voting on one of the nifty new electronic machines, with my trusty paper list of my choices, carefully compiled beforehand. When I got to the local offices, something strange happened. Sometimes the name I had chosen was not on the ballot. If I chose someone else (Green party candidate, for instance), the missing name would suddenly pop into view. If I then changed my vote, I could pick the candidate of my choice and the first vote did not show up.
The first time this happened, I wasn't sure whether the machine would let me do a second choice, but it seemed to work OK, and changed my vote.
When I got to the end of the ballot (three screens full of items to check) it showed one race where I hadn't made a choice. I read the instructions on the screen, clicked through to a different screen, and made a vote. (This was for a school board election, and I had not seen the name of my preferred candidate on the screen at all when I went through the first time, so I had just skipped that vote.)
I did not report this weirdness to the election officials because it all seemed to work out, but now I am wondering if this was a little bit of obstruction that somebody, somewhere, thought would be helpful in weeding out some of the votes. This was at a machine designated for the handicapped, with a special low stand. I'm a pretty good reader and I have good manual dexterity, but what about people who struggle more than I do?
Just want to know if anybody else has this experience during this voting cycle.