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Touch Screen Machine Scaring Off Senior Citizen Election Judges
from the unintended-consequences dept
Well, here's a completely unexpected consequence of Maryland going to all touchscreen voting systems: the election judges who watch over the voting process, who are mostly senior citizens, are scared off by the high-tech machines. The old voting system, they could handle. However, understanding a touchscreen voting system when many of them are still shying away from computers is too much. And, apparently, it's not easy to find election judges, so when they scare off a good percentage of the usual crowd, there's a definite shortage.
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Old-style and seniors are an election nightmare!!
I'm in charge of an election precinct in my city -- possibly the only non-senior citizen doing the task in the area, based on who showed up at the training session. I *wish* we'd go to electronic; the old paper method is a bureaucratic nightmare, and involves more potential (or real) mishaps than anybody not working the precincts can imagine. There's no level of computer error that can match the level of the problems we ran into, and there's no degree of electronic corruption that makes up for what careful volunteers could easily get away with.
The fact that we rely on (often extremely old) seniors without screening them to make sure they're not senile or seriously prejudiced is an additional problem. One of the two that was on my team last time was so negligent (possible dementia) that I spent most of my time "cleaning up" the havoc he caused. He also insulted quite a few voters with horrendous racist/misogynistic/homophobic comments, as if almost nullifying several hundred votes wasn't enough.
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