So I decided to do my civil duty and vote today. I only work a half-day on Tuesdays, so I slept in and got over to my East Phoenix polling place around noon.
While I was walking through the nearly empty parking lot to the school building that is my election site. I ran into a rather harried looking man with ID hanging from a lanyard around his neck. He was doing a rather fast walk so I let him into the building before me. The two poll workers looked rather relieved to see him and one went to greet him and took him immediately to the touch screen voting computer that stood beside the other voting booths. Apparently it had screwed up from the beginning and its printer had spat out at least 15 error messages. I grabbed my ballot (we use optical scan ballots where you connect broken lines next to the name of the person you want to vote for) and went and voted and fed it into the machine that tabulates the votes. Having some time on my hands I asked the repair guy who at this point was inserting and reinserting a card in the front of it if this was one of the Diebold machines I have heard about. He said, "Yeah, I have been running over half the valley trying to put out fires with these POSs". One of the poll workers said they even had problems with the things during training. After watching him screw with it for a minute I went about my business.
In Arizona, at least in Maricopa County, we use optical scan machines that leave a paper trail. But disabled voters have to use the touch screen machines. I have read about the Diebold machines but this was the first one I had seen up close and personal. I was not impressed to say the least. I hope they got it fixed before any disabled voters came in, but having read that Pima County is trying to move to these things makes me wonder if I will not hear about more problems with these things in Arizona. And one last thing, I was the 18th person to vote at my polling spot by noon today. I guess people had better things to do.