Don’t blame the voting machines, blame the workers

A lot has been said about the electronic voting machine used in the 2008 Municipal Election. Most of which is negative; however, I would argue that the machines worked quite well, the issue is with the people working the machines.

These “mystery ballots” were special ballots that were not opened until election night. When the workers tried to feed them into the machine, it said that there were problems with the ballot. Well, with the voter not there to correct it, they simply stuck them in a drawer. That was an error on their part. They should have alerted other officials immediatly. But this is nothing compared to the next issue - ballot tampering.

There are stories of workers marking on the ballots so that they would be accepted by the machine (because the voter did not darken their choices enough). That is something I find quite disturbing. Would you want someone filling out your ballot? There is a reason the machine wouldn’t accept the ballot, and that’s why the voter should have gotten it back and been asked to darken their choices.

The worst part is that the ballots may now be tampered with, and it will be impossible for a judge to look at them and determine who marked on the ballot - the voter or the worker.

These machines work great as long as the people running them follow the rules. I hope this serves as a wakeup call to the election officials and will ensure that these problems are fixed in time for the next election.