Here's a few highlights, covering elections from 2004 to 2010
Although the folks that ran the polling place were very pleasant and helpful, the accessibility feature would not work. They tried plugging the key pad unit into more than one of the systems and called the tech support desk for help. The "support desk" just asked if they had checked to make sure the cable was plugged in and then said to give up and have someone assist me in voting. They never did get the "accessible keypad" working while I was there.
My own voting experience started, at 7 in the morning, with a one hour wait in the cold, outside our Sunnyoaks fire station. I had to keep my braille reading fingers in my pocket to make sure they would be warm enough for reading my braille notes. Even so, the polling place was so cold that my fingers were having a lot of trouble reading braille near the end of my time at the voting machine.
The polling officers (who were actually very pleasant), didn't know how to reboot the Sequoia Edge II DRE into audio mode, it took them about 18 minutes to get it started talking. Thankfully, my wife read their manual and figured out the audio boot up process for them. After the DRE finally started talking, it took me about 6 minutes to fill out the ballot, 7 minutes to review my vote, and another minute to push it into recording my ballot and finish. Total time in front of the machine, 32 minutes. Luckily it was only a short ballot with 8 easy choices.
... By the time the system printed the paper trail and then spit out my voter ID card, I had spent a total of 59 and a half minutes, nearly an hour, trying to vote privately.
This was the fifth election in which I attempted to vote on a Sequoia Edge II. It took an hour and 17 minutes at the machine, not counting the time in line. This time the poll workers actually knew how to set up the audio mode properly. They told me that they asked for special training on the audio setup in their poll worker training class, because they knew that "a blind engineer" (trouble maker?) was going to be trying to vote there again. This makes only two out of five times that the poll workers have been able to successfully set up the audio voting mode by themselves.
The speech quality actually seems to be worse than before. When switched to the higher speed, it does a chipmunk distortion, rather than using VSC compression to properly increase the speech rate.
This June's primary election was the ninth opportunity I've had to try to vote on the Sequoia Edge II electronic voting machine in actual elections. There was no line when we arrived, so I signed in at 2:22 PM and was soon shown the way back into a fairly private nook among the stacks. At 2:54, more than a half an hour after we started, the voting machine was at last talking and ready for me to start making my audio ballot selections.
At 3:19, I was finished making my selections and ready to review my ballot.
Year by year, I've observed more and more erosion in the quality of training of pollworkers, regarding the "accessible" voting machines, and respect for privacy and good security procedures continues to diminish. In our county, the electronic voting systems have become a segregated, second class balloting system with sadly waning support and reliability. Who can be expected to go to all the trouble of finding their way to a polling place where the "accessible" voting system is not reliable and is not likely to be working?
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CommentVincent Cheng
Paul Reader