I thought these guys slept standing up. Guess not.
Voted right after lunch. I thought it was a little strange that after I’d filled out my ballot, I had to run it through the scanner face-up. That meant the poll worker by the machine could easily have looked at the ballot and seen how I voted. While I’m sure he wasn’t going to put that info to any use, and may actually have been forbidden to do so, there’s got to be a better way to do this. Secret ballots should be as secret as possible. Otherwise, you can end up with problems like the ones mentioned briefly in this book. In the 1880s, workers in some company towns in the U.P. had to ask the poll workers for a red ballot or a blue ballot, each color ballot representing one of the major political parties. If the worker asked for the “wrong” color of ballot, that worker usually got fired within a week.
I think every poll worker there was over 65, and they were all bored to tears. I was the only voter there at the time. I chatted with them for a bit after filling out my ballot. About 80 people had voted that day, and over twice that number had turned in early ballots. They wanted more people to come in and vote. While Googling for the rules that Arizona poll workers are supposed to follow, I found a bunch of articles like this one, talking about all the problems that AZ has been having. At my polling place, everything was working great. Show ID, get looked up in election roll, sign election roll, fill out ballot, scan ballot, done. No problems. Of course, this was a local, non-partisan election, so turnout was low and there was no hassle about registering as (R) or (D).
Another post tomorrow morning about Fuzzball’s medical problems.
Giraffe drinking at the Phoenix Zoo.
