vote early and often
Sep. 30th, 2024 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWorking fulltime outside the home sure is cramping my style. And by "style" I mean "ability to keep up with basic life maintenance." It is also tiring to be around other people All Damn Day.
This is the first provincial general election being run under a new modernized electronic voting regimen. Instead of checking off voters on a printout (or handwritten book) there's now laptops that connect to a central polling place. Ballots are full-size 8 1/2 x 11 sheets with giant circles to fill in (using a sharpie), and they get run through vote tabulators immediately (and also saved for manual recount if necessary). (The tabulators DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET in any way shape or form.) There's six days of early voting for a week or so before Final Voting Day (19 October), and also you can come into the district electoral office and vote any time after the election's been officially called, four weeks before FVD.
The whole process is going about as well as you would expect. I can absolutely see where this is going to make life much much easier for everyone once all the kinks have been worked out, and also it is a logistical and technical nightmare at the moment. It does not help that headquarters has demonstrated a repeated tendency to roll out policies and instructions without thinking through the cost of compliance, and then to change their minds a day or three later. (It also does not help that despite there being strict instructions to not do X preparation before Y day because it will break something, various electoral districts keep doing X preparation in an effort to 'get ahead' and screw things up, sometimes for everyone. JUST READ AND FOLLOW THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR. Le sigh.)
The work itself is IT / tech-support, which involves a great deal of moving and connecting equipment and pretending I understand more about Windows networking than I actually do. Any actual Windows expertise I have is circa WinXP and while some of the underlying technology and concepts remain the same there's a lot that I just sort of shrug at in bafflement. Also printers and printer servers are nonsense.
I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it as such but it beats asking "would you like some fries with that".
This is the first provincial general election being run under a new modernized electronic voting regimen. Instead of checking off voters on a printout (or handwritten book) there's now laptops that connect to a central polling place. Ballots are full-size 8 1/2 x 11 sheets with giant circles to fill in (using a sharpie), and they get run through vote tabulators immediately (and also saved for manual recount if necessary). (The tabulators DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET in any way shape or form.) There's six days of early voting for a week or so before Final Voting Day (19 October), and also you can come into the district electoral office and vote any time after the election's been officially called, four weeks before FVD.
The whole process is going about as well as you would expect. I can absolutely see where this is going to make life much much easier for everyone once all the kinks have been worked out, and also it is a logistical and technical nightmare at the moment. It does not help that headquarters has demonstrated a repeated tendency to roll out policies and instructions without thinking through the cost of compliance, and then to change their minds a day or three later. (It also does not help that despite there being strict instructions to not do X preparation before Y day because it will break something, various electoral districts keep doing X preparation in an effort to 'get ahead' and screw things up, sometimes for everyone. JUST READ AND FOLLOW THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR. Le sigh.)
The work itself is IT / tech-support, which involves a great deal of moving and connecting equipment and pretending I understand more about Windows networking than I actually do. Any actual Windows expertise I have is circa WinXP and while some of the underlying technology and concepts remain the same there's a lot that I just sort of shrug at in bafflement. Also printers and printer servers are nonsense.
I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it as such but it beats asking "would you like some fries with that".
no subject
Date: 2024-10-01 12:22 am (UTC)Yup. I'm exhausted by the time I get home.
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Date: 2024-10-02 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-02 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-01 10:51 am (UTC)We have much the same voting system as you described. The poll workers look us up on computer and announce we are registered. They hand us big ballots and point us to booths to fill them out. Then we walk our ballots over to the scanning machine and insert them ourselves. For a couple of years, we had the option of paper or electronic balloting at yet a different machine. So few people wanted electronic (no physical record of the vote) that the election board gave up on them.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-02 08:42 pm (UTC)I am pretty happy with this voting method, and more so with the sheer amount of testing and confirmation that the tabulators have to go through. (Every tabulator gets tested before voting, and a random sampling get handcount-verified after voting.) And keeping the paper ballots just seems like a no-brainer.