I Voted. Did you?*

[johno]

20080205-140521-v705a
Originally uploaded by JohnO.

I was number 67 in to the machine at my polling place**, shortly after noon.

I commented how disgusted I was at such a low number.

The Precinct Captain responded that our area has lots and lots of mail in ballots.

Edit to add:

* If you are in the US in a state holding primaries today. Actually in California there are 7 state props and my county has 2 local props on the ballat, so it's not just primaries to vote on.

** My county went back to paper going into OCR machines. One per precinct station. No clue how many folks are in my precinct.

Comments

more on the CA voting

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen on the news, we're going to have the highest turnout for a primary in 28 years, i.e. since 1980. Roughly 56%. Those empty polling places are the result of more and more people signing up for Ballot By Mail (which the county actively encourages).

In spite of that, some places ran out of ballots. This was due to the much larger than usual crossover voting. In CA, parties can decide to let people who don't register for ANY party vote in their primary. The Republicans do not, but the Democrats (and American Independents) do. Apparently a LOT of "Declines to state" people decided they wanted to vote in the Democratic primary this year. Some places went to local Copy houses to make temporary ballots, or if people had brought their sample ballots (like they are supposed to) they could use those. And there was also some confusion about whether the people at the polling place were supposed to OFFER the choice of 3 ballots or not. The Voter Information packet I got said that the voter had to REQUEST to vote in the Democrat or American Independent primaries. Some places were automatically offering each "declines to state" voter a choice of 3, others just handed out the "only initiatives" ballot =unless= the voter specifically asked for a different one.

And the news reported that one polling place closed about 4 hours early - no explanation given - and they had to send new people down there to re-open it.

So a couple of weak points in training the polling place volunteers.