Bill Roper's Journal

In the category of "Surely This Can't Be Right", here's what happened at my polling place today in my ward in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. As I recall, this is what happened last time and someone said that was wrong and the election workers would be retrained. Not so much, it seems.

I handed over my driver's license so they could scan it, this being the easiest way to look up my voter registration. They flipped the screen over and I signed it as best as I could with the stylus. The election worker there passed the signature, printed out a slip of paper, and I moved onto the next station where I was handed two enormous paper ballots and a "privacy shield".

Off to the voting booth I went, where I filled in all of the ovals, including those on the second sheet, which was entirely for our "judicial retention ballot" about which the less said, the better. (Ok, I didn't fill in *all* the ovals. I skipped all the uncontested races.)

So far, so good. Up to the scanner to submit my ballots, using the privacy shield to cover the little marked ovals. And *then*, the election worker needed to slide the privacy shield out of the way so that he could *initial* each ballot in the corner, giving him an easy glance at the most important races. If the ballots had gone into the scanner without being initialed, they wouldn't have been counted in any recount.

This leaves the questions of "What good is the privacy shield?" and "Shouldn't the ballots have been initialed when they were handed to me so that my ballot would actually remain secret?"

Now, I don't really think the election worker *cared* about checking my ballot choices. It *is*, however, the principal of the thing. (I would say that I did briefly check for snipers on my way to the car afterwards, but that would be exaggerating. A lot.)

Seriously, this is *not* the way this is supposed to work.

Just a couple of updates on recent posts:

The interactive (smaller) and print (huge) versions of the Windycon 48 program book are now available on the front page of the Windycon website. I highly encourage you all to download it and take a look at it, as it has the long-form bios of all of our guests, along with program updates that may be newer than what are in the program list on the website itself.

(It is also noteworthy that the program book has 7.5 pages of information on our panels and 6.5 pages of information on our policies. I find the fact that our policies *could* be boiled down to "don't do stupid things" in most cases, possibly along with an addendum that says "treat other people well" -- although I'd like to think that's covered by the first statement -- but that doesn't seem to be clear enough for some folks to interpret correctly. Thus, we have words. Oh, so many words.)

Moving on from Windycon to the not-so-secret ballot problem. There was a discussion going on over at NextDoor, which is yet another social networking site which covers the local area, and various election things were being discussed. I explained how my ballot had been handled and someone there who seems to be up the food chain in the training of election judges is apparently going to be having a discussion with our local judges, because my paper ballot should have been initialed before it was ever handed to me. Also, I should have been given a privacy shield for it.

This jibes with my memory of how things had been handled in the past, so I am somewhat reassured that there is someone who actually cares about these issues and is going to try to get it fixed.

And that's the news!