Today I registered my vote in the North Carolina primary election. I was only interested in one race for our NC House seat, where a total wingnut Republican was running against a somewhat less wingnutty Republican, with no one in the Democratic race. The winner of today’s primary will be my representative. Since, everything else being equal, I’d prefer the less wingnutty Republican, I took advantage of the fact that I’m registered as an independent and voted in the Republican primary.
There were a few other races on the ballot, but I didn’t want to vote in those races, being less informed about the level of wingnuttery in those contests.
The North Carolina electoral powers-that-be apparently ignored my appeals for paper ballots, because instead we had to use spanking-new touchscreen voting machines (It’s a computerâ„¢, so it must be easy-to-useâ„¢). Despite the glitzy technology, they were much more difficult to use than the old machines (press a physical button to light up an LED next to your candidate of choice, when you’re finished making your selections press VOTE). No, these new machines require you to navigate through a perplexing series of menus. When you’re done, instead of a nice big “VOTE” button, you have to click on some kind of warning button. I don’t remember exactly what the button said, but the sense of it was “are you really sure you want to do this, idiot?”
I think the computer was displeased that I had only voted in one race, and was trying to encourage me to navigate back through the perplexing menu system and choose more wingnuts in the other Republican primaries. But it had already warned me several times that I didn’t vote in some of the races, and I’d already indicated that I didn’t care. When the process is complete, the computer should give me some indication as to which button to press to register my vote, instead of requiring me to click on a warning button with no indication that this was the only way to register my vote.
Consider how easy it would have been with a paper ballot. The election official would have handed me the ballot, I would have filled in the machine-readable square next to my candidate of choice, and placed it in the ballot box. I would have left with the feeling that my intentions had been properly registered, instead of wondering whether the @$*@!%@@ computer was working properly.
Voting shouldn’t feel like you’re doing something wrong.
Ah, but to the wingnuts, voting for the less wingnutty candidate IS doing something wrong. I’ll be there are some states in which, if you try to vote for a Democrat, the touch screen comes back with “Are you sure about that?”