Vote early, vote often*
Wheee! I voted today!
I found out that the Glendale County Courthouse(/police department/town hall/any-other-government-function bldg) is one of the Early Voting Centers for my county, and I love Glendale anyway, so I went there first thing this morning to vote. 'Cause, see, I hadn't actually gone to bed yet; I was staying up after leaving work at Insane-O-Clock in the morning, like I always do.
(Glendale is a wonderful little oddity of a town, here in the Denver Metro area. It's a teeny tiny little town, only 0.6 square miles, right in the middle of SE Denver. I lived there about a decade ago, and loved it. Even though it's right in the middle of Denver, somehow it actually does feel like living in a small town. I even attended the Glendale Citizens Police Academy classes, a series of six weekly "get to know your Friendly Local Police Department And How It Works" classes. And purely by coindicence, the Mayor-At-That-Time, Joe Rice, was attending the classes as well, so I got to know him fairly well, too. The whole thing was lots of fun.)
There were only two people in front of me, so I got to vote right away, right when the polls opened. Glendale also has those Sequoia electronic ballot machines, and it was the first time I'd ever voted on one of the things, which made me apprehensive; but these were the ones modified with a paper record, so I felt a bit better about the process once I discovered that feature. Each machine has a paper roll cartridge -- kinda similar to grocery store receipt paper rolls -- and when you are reviewing all your votes on the screen, it prints out your votes a page at a time, and you review that as well as what's on the screen, and then when you push the final approval button, it scrolls the paper into the receiving end of the cartridge. So there actually is a paper record of all votes cast, and the cartridges are replaced regularly and stored in case of a recount.
I chatted with one of the poll workers while I waited, and he said that Sequoia is also in charge of handling the mailed ballots (geez, they contracted those out as well? Oh yeah that's a good idea...), and it seems about 15,000 (or was it 18,000) ballots never got to their recipients in the Denver area. So those people got tired of waiting and are coming into the voting centers to vote, and are then given... you guessed it... provisional ballots. And there have been so many of them that the Glendale voting center at least has been running out of the provisional ballots! (Wow, gee, isn't that a shame. What a coincidence! I wonder how many of those people who didn't get their ballots in the mail had a "D" after their names....) Also, Colorado is one of the six or seven swing states that have had their voter rolls illegally purged. Again, wow, what a coincidence! And of course it was reported (in the New York Times) that the purges were just a procedural error, nothing sinister, no of course it didn't happen to Democratic-leaning demographics more than others, why would you think such a silly thing?
Now none of this is the poll workers' fault... I'm not saying that at all. The ones at the Glendale voting center were wonderful, very friendly and helpful, and they were upset at all the vote-blocking shenanigans too. (Though the one I talked to didn't use those words... lol... that's my own editorial comment.) But I am sure glad I got in early, and thus won't have to deal with the insanity that's bound to occur next Tuesday.
*"vote often" = This is, of course, a joke. I am in no way, shape, or form advocating any sort of vote tampering or fraud.
I found out that the Glendale County Courthouse(/police department/town hall/any-other-government-function bldg) is one of the Early Voting Centers for my county, and I love Glendale anyway, so I went there first thing this morning to vote. 'Cause, see, I hadn't actually gone to bed yet; I was staying up after leaving work at Insane-O-Clock in the morning, like I always do.
(Glendale is a wonderful little oddity of a town, here in the Denver Metro area. It's a teeny tiny little town, only 0.6 square miles, right in the middle of SE Denver. I lived there about a decade ago, and loved it. Even though it's right in the middle of Denver, somehow it actually does feel like living in a small town. I even attended the Glendale Citizens Police Academy classes, a series of six weekly "get to know your Friendly Local Police Department And How It Works" classes. And purely by coindicence, the Mayor-At-That-Time, Joe Rice, was attending the classes as well, so I got to know him fairly well, too. The whole thing was lots of fun.)
There were only two people in front of me, so I got to vote right away, right when the polls opened. Glendale also has those Sequoia electronic ballot machines, and it was the first time I'd ever voted on one of the things, which made me apprehensive; but these were the ones modified with a paper record, so I felt a bit better about the process once I discovered that feature. Each machine has a paper roll cartridge -- kinda similar to grocery store receipt paper rolls -- and when you are reviewing all your votes on the screen, it prints out your votes a page at a time, and you review that as well as what's on the screen, and then when you push the final approval button, it scrolls the paper into the receiving end of the cartridge. So there actually is a paper record of all votes cast, and the cartridges are replaced regularly and stored in case of a recount.
I chatted with one of the poll workers while I waited, and he said that Sequoia is also in charge of handling the mailed ballots (geez, they contracted those out as well? Oh yeah that's a good idea...), and it seems about 15,000 (or was it 18,000) ballots never got to their recipients in the Denver area. So those people got tired of waiting and are coming into the voting centers to vote, and are then given... you guessed it... provisional ballots. And there have been so many of them that the Glendale voting center at least has been running out of the provisional ballots! (Wow, gee, isn't that a shame. What a coincidence! I wonder how many of those people who didn't get their ballots in the mail had a "D" after their names....) Also, Colorado is one of the six or seven swing states that have had their voter rolls illegally purged. Again, wow, what a coincidence! And of course it was reported (in the New York Times) that the purges were just a procedural error, nothing sinister, no of course it didn't happen to Democratic-leaning demographics more than others, why would you think such a silly thing?
Now none of this is the poll workers' fault... I'm not saying that at all. The ones at the Glendale voting center were wonderful, very friendly and helpful, and they were upset at all the vote-blocking shenanigans too. (Though the one I talked to didn't use those words... lol... that's my own editorial comment.) But I am sure glad I got in early, and thus won't have to deal with the insanity that's bound to occur next Tuesday.
*"vote often" = This is, of course, a joke. I am in no way, shape, or form advocating any sort of vote tampering or fraud.