EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Noel Runyan
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | Voting Experience in November 2004 Election In Santa Clara County California - Using Sequoia Voting Machines by NHR My own voting experience started, at 7 in the morning, with a 1 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. After signing in, and getting my voter smart card, I had to wait 8 minutes for them to reboot the audio voting machine. They had been using it for touch screen voting, as there was a very long line and just 5 voting machines for our combined 2-precinct site. I had my braille notes in a hard-back notebook, so I could read my notes with the notebook on my lap. Thankfully someone found me a chair to sit down while voting. Otherwise, I would have had to tilt the display down flat and put my notes and keypad on top of the back side of the display. Since we were in very tight quarters, it was a good thing that the audio terminal was in a corner, at the end of the line of machines. This meant that I didn't have to worry about my chair blocking traffic in the very tight aisle. I decided to use paper braille notes, rather than my talking laptop computer or a paperless braille notetaker, because I had heard that people would not be allowed to use computers and other electronic equipment in the polling place. For the next election, we need to address the issue of an exception for accessible note taking devices. The volume control on the front of the key pad was not working well, and was resulting in scratchy and intermittent sound. By the time I got the volume set to where I could understand it, the introduction message had already finished the English instructions and was off into other languages. I was not sure what I should do, so I finally gave up and pressed the select button. This eventually got me to the language menu, where I was able to select English and get started with my ballot. The first major problem I had was that the ballot on the machine was not in the same order as the printed sample ballot. When my wife pointed this out to the chief poll worker, they were surprised to see the difference, and said maybe that would explain why they found that it was taking voters longer than expected to vote. Because my notes were done in the order of the sample ballot, I had to do a lot of hopping around in my notes and more thorough and careful listening to the machine. In contrast to what we had been told, the list of candidate names was spoken in alphabetical order. It took me 30 minutes to work my way through the ballots and make my selections. After that, I had quite a bit of trouble getting into the review mode, to get a full list of all my selections. When I did, it went on and on, for 23 minutes, like a long uncontrolled drink from a firehouse. The review function read each item, and then, at the very end, said what my selection was for that item. It even threw in the details of what the fiscal impact would be, and took forever. This is completely backwards. It should announce the name of the item, then state my selection, and then read the rest of the information for that item. Also, I should have the control to press the arrow key to move forward or backward through the items, without having to listen to all the text about an item. When I did find that I had made a mistake in my selections, I had to wait until the end of the whole review process to correct it, instead of being able to stop, make the change, and then continue with the review where I left off. I did not want to abort the ballot verification review, to make a correction, and then have to start the 23 minute review all over again. When I later attempted to change one of my selections from "no" to "yes", the machine would not let me just select "yes", until I had first gone to the "no" entry and deselected it. This was very awkward and confusing. My wife said that she also had the problem when she was voting visually on her DRE machine. At one point, as I was nearing the end of the ballot, I was dumped back into the language selection menu. I was being very careful to not push the "help" button, so I don't know why this language menu popped up. For a scary minute, I was afraid I had just lost my ballot and was having to start all over. I re-selected "English" and fortunately was returned to my previous location in the ballot. An additional frustration was that the volume on some of the messages was so much lower than the rest of the messages that I had to fiddle with turning up the volume, repeating the message, and then turning the volume back down before proceeding. The volume on all the messages should be normalized to make them the same. This is easy to do and should be done for all messages. From the time I signed in and got my voter smart card, it took 8 minutes to reboot the machine as an audio voting machine, 30 minutes to make my choices, 23 minutes to review and verify, and another 4 minutes to make a correction and record my vote. Not counting the hour waiting in line, it took me about 65 minutes to mark and record my ballot. (Continued on next comment)