Well, I voted this morning. Kind of.
I arrived at the John Yehall Chen school on Broadway here in San Francisco to cast my ballot, just in time to overhear one of the poll workers on the phone with an election official, being walked through the process to correct an error with the optical ballot reader.
The problem? The machine wasn't reading any ballots. It thought the polls were closed.
Well, they fixed the problem while I was still voting, and then it was my turn to have the machine read my ballot (2 seperate optical ballot pages). Page 1 goes in. The machine does its foo, I see the red LED counter tick up by 1. I try to insert page 2 of my ballot. It won't go in. Kind of how sometimes you can't get a dollar bill to go in to the Coke machine's reader. About 30 seconds go by, and then the little receipt printer on top of the machine spits out a message.
Machine unable to read ballots. POLLS CLOSED. 9:41 AM 06/06/2006
And the poll worker standing beside the machine sighs deeply. The technician from the Election Board had just left. So I ended up having half my ballot counted, with the other page dropped into the 'auxillary bin' for later tallying.
6 years after the Florida debacle, you'd think we'd have figured out this voting thing...