We went to vote at the VFW today (our new polling place this year), and there were no signs about the fact that voting was going on. The only door that showed light inside was a door to the VFW lodge/bar and a bunch of old guys eating breakfast were inside. They pointed us (my wife, my neighbor and me) to the other side of the building, which looked closed up. As we stood there commenting "so, where do we go?", a guy came out through the door and we realized we needed to go in there.
My wife presented her ID, and after re-spelling her name several times, they found her and said "OK, and had her sign the book". I then presented my ID to the same worker and said "and I'm right below her, same address". The women looked at it concernedly and pointed out that my address did not match my registration address (something that, according to the secretary of state's web page and the flyer at the library, is not a problem). They asked me for additional proof of my address, which I told them I did nto have. I explained that it didn't matter, as the flyer said this is no problem. Her response was "well, the rules they gave out were kind of vague". I explained that I had nothing else, and that I live at and own the home on the registration sheet. Finally, after showing my employee ID and then getting into an argument (they laughed after I showed them the ID, because it had no address), I was allowed to vote.
When we got outside, after complaining that it was hard to find the way in, the old VFW guys who eat breakfast there every morning had hand-written a sign with an arrow that pointed to the correct entrance door.
My parents had a similar experience over in a suburb of Cleveland, where the voting place was listed as the "Junior High", but they had to walk around inside to figure out that voting was in the "wrestling room", which is a side room off of the Gym. Read my mother's e-mail below:
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Mother's E-mail:
There was no sign visible on the middle school to show to go into the wrestling gym. People were going into the main entrance of the Jr. High. I think they had a sign up there. Many people did not understand that they had to present an I.D. to vote. Also, people were voting on provisionals and not stopping back at the registration table to give a card to the workers, and 3 votes would have been just "chucked" if I hadn't said, "No, I am not in a hurry. Take care of this now so you can count those votes." It took them about 6 minutes to straighten it out. If it hadn't been for this old woman in her 80's that was working there, those provisionals would not have been counted, as it held up the line, and the younger (my age and older) workers were saying, "They didn't even stop by here to give us their cards, so that's just tough." The older lady said, "Well, what they had to do wasn't explained well enough." Then she started giving orders as to what to do, and they got it straightened out.
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Additional story:
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Goldwood moved the voting from the cafeteria to the gym, too, much to everybody's surprise. One of the electronic booths was already broken when I got there at 6:50 a.m. to vote -- they got it working again and unfortunately, I had to vote at it. It seemed to work, but the paper jammed in the backup reel, so I really hope my vote counted, because there is no backup for mine.
I motioned for the computer geek (don''t worry, I AM one, so I don't mean that as an insult) to come fix the machine after I voted, and I hung around for a minute while he got the manual out to look up how to unjam the paper reel. He assured me about 10 times that my vote had been safely and electronically submitted. I think I made him nervous.
An older man was two booths down from mine and was asking one of the elderly poll worker ladies how to review is whole ballot, since the entire summary didn't show up in one screen. The elderly poll worker -- who obviously knew nothing about computer screens -- didn't know to tell him about clicking on the arrow to scoot the screen down to see the rest of your summary. So the guy backed up to the beginning of his electronic ballot and checked the boxes all over again just to make sure he had voted how he wanted to! (This happened while I was in line and had not yet seen the voting booths, or I would have told him what to do!)
The overall impression I got was that the folks staffing Goldwood's voting booths were not properly trained to help the folks using the machines for the first time. And they didn't seem to know who was supposed to check I.D.s ... Kind of a nightmare, I thought.
SOOO reassuring, you know?
-- barb
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