< 7 AM VOTING
It’s 6:42 am, and polls opened 42 minutes ago here in Indiana. I was 5th in line at my polling place at about 5:51 am, just in time to watch the live news report and be on camera for a few minutes. This was my first primary vote, my first in-person vote in Indiana, and actually my first at-a-machine vote in history (Oregon is all vote-by-mail).
Man did they have issues. As soon as polls opened, each one of their check-in machines crashed at least 10 times. They thought it was due to high activity around the state on whatever servers run the system, but find that sort of hard to believe — it’s not as though everyone was really powering through at 6 am. Though they had tons of issues actually getting people to the polling machines themselves, once I was there, it was surprisingly smooth. Dare I say the voting experience itself was perfectly acceptable. I have no idea what types of machines they were using and my thoughts on electronic voting machines are well known, but absent these more theoretical complaints it couldn’t have gone much better.
This is probably the first election I’ve voted in where there’s some major ambiguity as to who will win (the democratic nomination). Cross your fingers everyone. Cheers.
What kind of machine did they have? Last I voted in IN they still had the mechanical lever operated ones. I know they still had them in my old precinct in Indianapolis as late as the ‘04 election.
completely electronic/touch screen. they gave me a card with a chip on it which i used to log into the machine … which theoretically recorded my vote, and i gave the card back to the guy at the desk.
At my polling station they were just doing paper ballots and i filled in bubbles. Then i popped it in some machine and it recorded my vote.