Poll workers struggle with e-ballots

[icymist]

New voting machines confounded some poll workers around the country on Election Day, and a combination of electronic glitches and human error forced some precincts to extend voting hours or switch to paper ballots.

More than 80 percent of the nation's voters were expected to cast some type of electronic ballot Tuesday, which was the deadline for major reforms mandated by the federal Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress to prevent a rerun of the 2000 election debacle.

While people in hundreds of precincts waited in long lines, reports of voter intimidation and dirty tricks surfaced in at least three states.

In Arizona, three men, one of them armed, stopped Hispanic voters and questioned them outside a Tucson polling place, according to voting monitors for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which photographed the incidents and reported them to the FBI
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[texpatriot2004]

1. kick nm

[rocktivity]

2. Why weren't these people trained on how the use the machines?

:mad:
rocknation

[Boomer]

3. Because it costs time and money that states don't have

I've just finished a 15-hour shift as a poll worker in West Virginia, and the training session for the ENTIRE election process was about three hours. It's hard to get enough volunteers to work that kind of day, PLUS the training session a week or two before.

In those 3 hours we cover how to work with poll books, provisional ballots, affidavits, and dozens of other details. How to work the electronic voting booth gets about 15 minutes. That covers the basics of how to unfold the damn thing (which heavy, unwiedly and given to collapse), how to start it, working through the ballot, and closing the vote.

There's zippo time to cover technical issues, even if there was any hope that the volunteers had enough background to make sense of that training. Many pollworkers are retired people in their 50s and 60s (or older) and find computers confusing if not downright frightening.

We had two very dedicated poll workers whose only job was to go from precinct to precinct to deal with the electronic machines, but even they had no technical background.

[GetTheRightVote]

4. So this is the dirty cost of change per Repub ran machines

hhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

:kick: