hope is on the way
today is the 55th presidential election day in america. peggy and i voted early this morning. we were both on the phone last night with our kids going over the ballot propositions in detail. we agreed on 13 of the 16 propositions, and we agreed to disagree on the remaining three. on the national election we're clearly both kerry partisans. i have a kerry bumper sticker on my truck. kerry is not my first choice, but bush has been a complete disaster for this country and for the world. this is the day we've been waiting for: 11/2/04: the end of an error.

our rural polling place is the dining room at the anderson valley grange. until the march 2004 primary election we used punchcard ballots. in march mendocino county switched to optically scanned paper ballots, an excellent interim voting technology choice which provides a verifiable, manually recountable paper trail, and a big improvement over the discredited punch cards. the optical ballot is a paper card with ovals beside each office or proposition. filling in the oval with a black felt tip pen indicates the vote. after filling it out, the voter inserts the ballot into the optical scanner, perched like a small office machine beside the table where the poll workers sit. like similar devices, the scanner grabs the ballot and briskly sucks it inside. it is a fairly routine and understandable mechanical device.

today the grange was more crowded with voters than usual. while my ballot was being issued, a man was being taught how to insert his completed ballot into the optical scanner. "hmmmm," i thought as i walked to a polling booth, "he must not have voted in the primary." or he could have voted absentee (giving him the benefit of the doubt). i marked my ballot and walked towards the scanner. another man was being taught how to insert his ballot into the scanner. when it grabbed the ballot from him he jumped and blurted out, "whoa!" i didn't need any instruction to insert the ballot, because i had used the same system in the march election. what's interesting to me in this very small sample from my polling place is the presence of people voting in this election who did not vote in the last election. or at least did not vote in person.

i'm looking forward to the results tonight. my hope is that the obsessively publicised national polls showing a close race in an evenly divided country will be far wrong, that senator kerry will post a convincing and clean win in spite of the many republican dirty tricks, and that tomorrow the hand wringing can begin over the wretchedly wrong tracking polls used by the media to sell their dead heat horse race circus stories. dead heat? dead wrong. or so i hope.
posted by Will Ross at 09:31