I voted on a Sequoia today

Since I recently moved, this year I had a new polling place–across the street at the neighborhood cafe, De Luca. Detesting lines as I do, I figured that the least-busy hours would be between 1pm and 3pm, since 1) getting up early is a struggle for me, and that’s also when the most people hit the polling places–before they go to work 2) there might be a lunchtime rush (12pm – 1pm), and 3) the commuter traffic on the streets, el, and buses starts around 4:30pm. To my pleasant surprise, the place wasn’t crowded at all. There were at least two open machines / stations, and no line to check in. I always have issues with registering because sometimes I use the hyphenated version of my name, sometimes there’s a space between the “mc” and the “lean” and sometimes not, or I register under the name on my birth certificate (the whole family name debacle is too complicated for this post). The woman manning the address-checking position was on her cellphone the whole time, but still paying attention to what needed to be done. The woman who had to look up the voting cards LOVED the purse I was carrying (from my accessories line: Diskette Purse), and friendly enough. Once I said I chose the “electronic” machine, another friendly gentleman explained to me, after he correctly assumed that I prefered English to vote in, that if I wanted to “uncheck” an item, to just hit it again to undo it. Simple enough.

For the most part, the interface on these Sequoia machines is incredibly intuitive. Once the voter cad is inserted, you just hit the appropriate place on the touchscreen to check the box next to the candidate or choice you would like, and then hit the “next” button to go to the next virtual page. There are no scrollbars, only “next” and “previous” buttons. When you’re done, you get multiple pages where you confirm the choices you made. Then, to the right of the screen, a reciept prints out the names of your choices and you’re asked to confirm each one as it scrolls up next to the screen. When you confirm each, the following screen is printed out on the next “page” of printed receipt tape. There’s a box under each “page” that says “blank” to separate the “pages.” At the end of the receipt there’s an optical barcode. Once you’ve confirmed the printed receipt, you’re done.

I handed my card to the judge and left. The whole process only took me about 8 minutes, but I skipped the last two pages on voting for judges, since I subscribed to the “signal to noise” theory, that if you don’t have any data on making an informed choice, you shouldn’t just guess and add “noise” to the results.

Overall I liked the interface and paper-trail concept, although sometimes the touch-screen input was a bit sketchy. Perhaps, as is becoming the case with laptop musicians and DJs, we need a “MIDI interface” of sorts to give a tactile response. A simple MIDI / USB controller with A B C D buttons would do the job quite well.

technorati tags:government, politics, election, chicago, voting, 2006_election

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