America: I understand that volunteers staff the polling stations, but is it too much to ask for competence?
I went to vote yesterday & upon feeding my ballot into the machine, it made the standard sound that it had accepted my ballot. However, the tally on the machine did not change. I thought since I was voting on 2 ballots, it would change after I fed through the second ballot. It did not. Apparently, there were 15 or so machines in Tulsa that malfunctioned yesterday.
I alerted a volunteer & she had the next person in line submit one of their ballots & the number again stayed the same. Concerned, she placed a call to the election board (whose website, incidentally, doesn’t appear to have changed since it was first created). While doing this, I peeked at the machine’s receipt roll & noticed that it had repeated entries of “stuck ballot.”
After conversing with the election board, she came back to inform me that she couldn’t do anything. I asked if I should fill out a provisional ballot. She said no & that she was sorry but it seemed that my vote was lost. At this point, I began to suspect she was an ACORN secret agent. Shaking that idea, I determined she was simply incompetence, so I called the election board & after receiving the spiel about how Oklahoma’s voting system is so great because it leaves a paper trail, I was assured that my vote would be counted. After double-checking with the technician who had arrived on site during my call, he informed me, after repeating the aforementioned spiel, that my vote would be manually re-fed through the machine.
The fact that my vote was nearly derailed by a doofus, while initially grating & ultimately meaningless on the federal level, has since turned into a great story.