I haven't posted this here yet because I was dead for the last two days, but its better here than Ameripol. Context: I work as an election employee in the City of New York.
So they had a new ballot on Tuesday. A new, more complicated ballot. See previously, voting was fairly simple: you go to your table, sign your name, get your ballot, go to a privacy booth, fill out circles on the ballot SAT style, come to one of the scanners, slide it in, and you're done. Simple, right? Well, this ballot added a new step: it had two pages, attached to each other. So now you have to separate the ballots (carefully!), and then slide the ballots in one at a time. It was a small change, and made to accommodate ballot proposals.
And yet that small change led to so much pain. First, tearing a ballot can cause problems. If you tear it wrong, you might cause the paper to be uneven and thus the machine will sometimes reject it on your first or second (or third...) attempt. You might also accidentally void your ballot by ripping it wrong, but to my knowledge this never actually occurred (except maybe once, and bear in mind we had at least a thousand voters), since even though people are dumb, they aren't quite so dumb as to rip their ballot in that specific way. Second, in spite of their being instructions in every privacy sleeve and being instructed on what to do by the table people (and us scanner people, if it gets to us), some people did try to insert the ballots, either while still connected, or sometimes two at once (which led to the machines breaking down much more frequently).
In addition, there was also a new problem: Ballots are legal documents.1 One result of this is that ballots are taken very seriously. Some of the worst problems we can face involve ballots that people leave behind, because there are extremely few circumstances under which we're allowed to touch ballots that have been given to a voter (even if a voter asks us to touch them), and they have very strict rules. But having two ballots means the likelihood of "abandoned ballot" problems balloon: a voter might make a mistake on only one of their ballots, and if they vote on the other before trying the bad one, they have to get a new one, but only half of one: ordinarily it's quite obvious when someone has to get a new ballot since they have to return the old one, but now someone could have a half-vote while going back to the table, which opens up security issues. In addition, sometimes people just want to give up because one of the ballots doesn't interest them, but they really are not allowed to do that because then there'd be an extra ballot sitting around. And pretty much all of these problems lead to people getting frustrated.
And then there were more problems: rain was bad yesterday. Rain got on the privacy sleeves (how? I have no idea!). Rain on the privacy sleeves gets on the ballot. Wet ballots can cause paper jams. Paper jams means one of our eight machines break and the entire damn line slows down.
Another issue: more ballots mean people ask us more irrelevant questions ("Which one first?" "Does it scan both sides?") and fewer relevant ones (i.e. "Where do I insert this?"). The papers for instructing people how to vote with the new ballots were actually everywhere: before, voters would only get two things from us, a ballot and a privacy sleeve (and optionally a sticker). Now, they got three, the above two items, and this piece of paper instructing them what to do to tear the ballot. Now the ballot goes into the scanner, and the privacy sleeves are returned to us scanner people or to the tables. But the sheet of paper? It ended up everywhere. The area around the privacy booths was covered with papers people had abandoned on the floor, and entire privacy booths were a mess of completely useless paper (occasionally hiding an actually important piece of paper). And we had so many more than we needed even before the recycling of them.
And due to fears of overflowing ballot boxes, we actually had to shut down two machines later in the evening, because if it got to 800 votes we'd have to call the main office, shut it down, break the seals, take out the box, mark the votes, put in a new box, seal it up, mark it on the seals report, etc. etc. and that would take hours to do. In their defense, 800 votes means 1600 pages in a single box. That's a lot of pages.
But the worst thing is that people blame us. And not just the voters: I've seen at least two articles claiming that we aren't trained well enough, and at least one city politician claiming the same. There might be some merit to these claims if we'd ever been trained or even told about these two-page ballots to begin with! But no! They just introduced them without saying anything to us about it until the day of the election. And I can probably guess why: we'd have been able to tell them it was a bad idea as soon as we heard about it. Instead, we got... this, whatever it was.
1Unrelated wtf. A person actually walked up to a table with an inspector I was chatting with and asked if they could take a ballot with them. For sentimental purposes, presumably. I'm pretty sure we all looked at them like they had asked us to strip naked and lie in the path of an incoming car. No! No you cannot! A ballot is a legal document! Trying to walk out with a ballot is like one of the only two or three things we're authorized to get the onsite policeman for. I mean, I'm glad they asked instead of trying to just take one, but stoll (on the other hand, there's no way they could have gotten it without asking, since the ballots aren't exactly laying around or whatever, the only ones around are in the hands of Election Workers).
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14543833 times)