A funny thing happened on the way to the polling this morning. Showing up at Scotts Valley town hall, I proceeded through the process until I found myself faced with a touch screen and some helpful volunteers. With firm hand and the determined will of a Free Person Exercising his Franchise, I poked and prodded my way to the end and hit “Review”.
Two of my votes didn’t count.
The Review page showed two columns of cells, each with the title of the office at the top, the name of the selected candidate in the middle and a confirmation at the bottom. The fourth and fifth cells in the righthand column showed “SV School District” and “SV Fire Superintendent” at the top, respectively, followed by the names of my choices and a startling message below: “No Selection Made”.
And it was all in red. Red usually isn’t good in such circumstances.
A bit of further prodding proved to provide a solution. If I selected two candidates for each position and went back to the Review page everything had returned to a calming shade of black. In each of the aforementioned cells the title of the office remained at the top, and both selected candidates for both offices showed below.
Really, an incredibly open answer to the issue of contentious political debate. We’ll just electe two people to each position and let them fight it out once in office.
After a great deal of discussion and the assistance of the volunteers (who I gave permission to view my screen) – and a conversation on one of the volunteers’ cell phones with a person at the other end of the Emergency Hotline (a nice guy, by the sounds of it, who’s day just got pointedly problematic), we figured out how to cancel my selections and get me back on a paper ballot.
California’s electronic voting system just became unreliable.
Sorry I broke your thing, was it expensive?
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