boutons_
11-02-2006, 10:06 AM
More Poll Workers Recruited, But Training Proves Daunting
Some Frustrated by Electronic Devices, Remedial Learning
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 2, 2006; A01
He had heard the horror stories about the voter check-in machines crashing during Maryland's September primary. And he knew about the doomsday fears of hackers hijacking an election.
But Samuel Goodman's main concern during a training session last week for prospective election judges in Montgomery County was something far more simple: how to turn on the machines.
In the aftermath of glitches that marred primaries in Maryland and other states, a lot of attention has focused on electronic voting systems -- why they malfunctioned and how susceptible they are to attack. But the pillars of Election Day are the legions of judges, the human safeguards in a process that has become more complicated as voting has grown more automated and layered with regulations.
( Congress is broken, refuses to address the issues facing the country. Democracy is broken when the USA can't even figure out how to collect votes. The sheeple get the politicians, democracy, and country they want, and deserve. )
The judges, often known as poll workers, have been recruited en masse locally and across the country leading up to the general election Tuesday. Prince George's and Montgomery counties, for example, will have 300 more than in the September primary.
Goodman is part of the wave of hastily recruited Montgomery trainees, and at 73 he fits what elections officials say is the age profile of the average poll worker nationwide. Most are well into their retirement years, and the technology changes can be daunting for some of those who didn't grow up using computers. That is why some states are looking to recruit college, and even high school, students to work the polls.
Goodman, a former NBC television news producer who lives near Rockville, said he found the jargon of the training session offered by the county Board of Elections incomprehensible and the technology overwhelming. It wasn't long before his eagerness hardened to frustration as he realized the job of check-in judge was going to be a lot harder than he thought.
He's no computer whiz, but given a bit more time he could manage, he said. In a single three-hour class, "there was no way to absorb all that," he said.
For the most part, poll workers are ordinary people who work long hours for little pay and perform admirably under trying conditions. Since the 2000 presidential election debacle, several states, including Maryland, have replaced paper ballot voting with electronic systems, and poll workers have had to relearn their jobs.
Some states have new rules to learn about checking photo identification at the polls and offering provisional ballots.
"We've made more election reform in the last six years in this country than we had in the 230 before it," said Paul S. DeGregorio, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which was created in 2002 to help elections run smoothly. "When you have poll workers who have been used to one system for 20, 30, 40 years, teaching them a new system can take a couple of elections for them to get used to."
( why? how complicated can these machines be to operate? how stupid and dumbed-down are common people? Why have the macines been so badly designed and so over complicated? Can the whole system really be this fucked up? YES! :lol
America, the Feeble Wimp who Can't Vote Straight )
Across Maryland, officials launched an aggressive campaign to recruit judges after the troubled fall primary, saying they needed more people to help with the general election. The judges are hired temporarily and paid $150 or more to work at precincts on Election Day after several hours of training.
State officials have called for additional training, but some local elections administrators say the sessions aren't nearly long enough.
"I think we should do a lot more," said Robert J. Antonetti Sr., the Prince George's interim elections administrator. He added that many of the judges find the new technology "mind-boggling." The county has held training sessions almost nightly and twice on Saturdays, he said.
( There's a saying in software desing: "Easy-to-use is hard to do. Obviously, the Diebold, etc vendors didn't work very hard on the easy-to-use aspect, but still pocketed gross margins of probably well over 50% on these fucked up, insecure piece of shit machines )
Virginia did not experience any problems on the level of Maryland's during its primary, but it has also worked to recruit more judges in anticipation of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election. Helping the recruitment was a grant received by the University of Virginia, which went toward training 80 students from U-Va. and Piedmont College to be poll workers.
Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections, said recruiting efforts also were greatly aided by a new state law that prevents employers from penalizing workers who want to serve as elections judges, by, for example, forcing them to use a personal day.
Virginia uses touch-screen machines in 105 of its 135 cities and counties, with the rest using optical-scan machines. The touch-screen machines, which have been the focus of concerns in Maryland and elsewhere, have been operated in at least one previous election in each jurisdiction that is using them, Jensen said.
In Maryland, training sessions for Montgomery's judges have been held six days a week and will continue through Monday afternoon, the day before the election, officials said.
Montgomery is more familiar with electronic voting than most Maryland jurisdictions because it was introduced to the technology in 2002 with Prince George's and two other counties.
Still, the training session last week revealed how difficult it is for some prospective judges to master such a large amount of material in a short time. The trainees struggled with a new vocabulary: voter access cards, USB port, local area network, GEMS server. After the trainer said using the electronic poll book -- the machine that repeatedly faltered during the primary -- was a lot like using a PDA, Goodman wondered what a PDA is. It's a personal digital assistant, such as a BlackBerry or PalmPilot, he was told.
Later, when the instructor, Belinda Lee, asked the class to plug in the ethernet line, some stared blankly at the tangle of wires in front of them until she told them it was the one that looks like a telephone cord.
"Oy vey!" an exasperated Goodman blurted out.
During a break, trainee Joseph Burke, 80, of Chevy Chase thumbed through the thick three-ring binder he will have to become familiar with before Tuesday.
"That's a lot of stuff they threw at us," he said. "It's going to take some more studying."
Anthony DiLullo, 67, of Bethesda was comforted only by the fact that another check-in judge would be working the polls with him Election Day. "I hope the other person knows more than I do," he said.
Some fear that the changes in the way elections are run might be driving longtime poll workers away.
"It's a nationwide issue, and particularly when you transition to new equipment you see that some of your traditional poll workers decide it's time to retire," said DeGregorio, of the Election Assistance Commission. "So it puts the election officials in a bind in trying to fill the polls."
Although most poll workers are retirees who don't have to sacrifice a day of work to work the polls, states across the country are reaching out to younger generations, who have grown up using computers.
In Chicago, 754 high school students have been recruited to work the polls. Those younger than 18 are allowed to work as judges under a state law designed to involve younger people in the voting process, according to a news release. The city has also trained 2,000 college students to work as technicians at every polling place to prevent the kinds of problems that affected the city's primary this March.
( I suppose in red-states like OH and FL, they are only hiring students and young with solid Repug/radical-right credentials! :lol )
In Ohio, Cuyahoga County has turned poll worker training over to the local community college, which has extended sessions by an hour and limited the class sizes. People must pass a written exam before they can serve as poll workers on Election Day.
Staff writers Zachary A. Goldfarb, Rosalind S. Helderman and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.
Some Frustrated by Electronic Devices, Remedial Learning
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 2, 2006; A01
He had heard the horror stories about the voter check-in machines crashing during Maryland's September primary. And he knew about the doomsday fears of hackers hijacking an election.
But Samuel Goodman's main concern during a training session last week for prospective election judges in Montgomery County was something far more simple: how to turn on the machines.
In the aftermath of glitches that marred primaries in Maryland and other states, a lot of attention has focused on electronic voting systems -- why they malfunctioned and how susceptible they are to attack. But the pillars of Election Day are the legions of judges, the human safeguards in a process that has become more complicated as voting has grown more automated and layered with regulations.
( Congress is broken, refuses to address the issues facing the country. Democracy is broken when the USA can't even figure out how to collect votes. The sheeple get the politicians, democracy, and country they want, and deserve. )
The judges, often known as poll workers, have been recruited en masse locally and across the country leading up to the general election Tuesday. Prince George's and Montgomery counties, for example, will have 300 more than in the September primary.
Goodman is part of the wave of hastily recruited Montgomery trainees, and at 73 he fits what elections officials say is the age profile of the average poll worker nationwide. Most are well into their retirement years, and the technology changes can be daunting for some of those who didn't grow up using computers. That is why some states are looking to recruit college, and even high school, students to work the polls.
Goodman, a former NBC television news producer who lives near Rockville, said he found the jargon of the training session offered by the county Board of Elections incomprehensible and the technology overwhelming. It wasn't long before his eagerness hardened to frustration as he realized the job of check-in judge was going to be a lot harder than he thought.
He's no computer whiz, but given a bit more time he could manage, he said. In a single three-hour class, "there was no way to absorb all that," he said.
For the most part, poll workers are ordinary people who work long hours for little pay and perform admirably under trying conditions. Since the 2000 presidential election debacle, several states, including Maryland, have replaced paper ballot voting with electronic systems, and poll workers have had to relearn their jobs.
Some states have new rules to learn about checking photo identification at the polls and offering provisional ballots.
"We've made more election reform in the last six years in this country than we had in the 230 before it," said Paul S. DeGregorio, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which was created in 2002 to help elections run smoothly. "When you have poll workers who have been used to one system for 20, 30, 40 years, teaching them a new system can take a couple of elections for them to get used to."
( why? how complicated can these machines be to operate? how stupid and dumbed-down are common people? Why have the macines been so badly designed and so over complicated? Can the whole system really be this fucked up? YES! :lol
America, the Feeble Wimp who Can't Vote Straight )
Across Maryland, officials launched an aggressive campaign to recruit judges after the troubled fall primary, saying they needed more people to help with the general election. The judges are hired temporarily and paid $150 or more to work at precincts on Election Day after several hours of training.
State officials have called for additional training, but some local elections administrators say the sessions aren't nearly long enough.
"I think we should do a lot more," said Robert J. Antonetti Sr., the Prince George's interim elections administrator. He added that many of the judges find the new technology "mind-boggling." The county has held training sessions almost nightly and twice on Saturdays, he said.
( There's a saying in software desing: "Easy-to-use is hard to do. Obviously, the Diebold, etc vendors didn't work very hard on the easy-to-use aspect, but still pocketed gross margins of probably well over 50% on these fucked up, insecure piece of shit machines )
Virginia did not experience any problems on the level of Maryland's during its primary, but it has also worked to recruit more judges in anticipation of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election. Helping the recruitment was a grant received by the University of Virginia, which went toward training 80 students from U-Va. and Piedmont College to be poll workers.
Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections, said recruiting efforts also were greatly aided by a new state law that prevents employers from penalizing workers who want to serve as elections judges, by, for example, forcing them to use a personal day.
Virginia uses touch-screen machines in 105 of its 135 cities and counties, with the rest using optical-scan machines. The touch-screen machines, which have been the focus of concerns in Maryland and elsewhere, have been operated in at least one previous election in each jurisdiction that is using them, Jensen said.
In Maryland, training sessions for Montgomery's judges have been held six days a week and will continue through Monday afternoon, the day before the election, officials said.
Montgomery is more familiar with electronic voting than most Maryland jurisdictions because it was introduced to the technology in 2002 with Prince George's and two other counties.
Still, the training session last week revealed how difficult it is for some prospective judges to master such a large amount of material in a short time. The trainees struggled with a new vocabulary: voter access cards, USB port, local area network, GEMS server. After the trainer said using the electronic poll book -- the machine that repeatedly faltered during the primary -- was a lot like using a PDA, Goodman wondered what a PDA is. It's a personal digital assistant, such as a BlackBerry or PalmPilot, he was told.
Later, when the instructor, Belinda Lee, asked the class to plug in the ethernet line, some stared blankly at the tangle of wires in front of them until she told them it was the one that looks like a telephone cord.
"Oy vey!" an exasperated Goodman blurted out.
During a break, trainee Joseph Burke, 80, of Chevy Chase thumbed through the thick three-ring binder he will have to become familiar with before Tuesday.
"That's a lot of stuff they threw at us," he said. "It's going to take some more studying."
Anthony DiLullo, 67, of Bethesda was comforted only by the fact that another check-in judge would be working the polls with him Election Day. "I hope the other person knows more than I do," he said.
Some fear that the changes in the way elections are run might be driving longtime poll workers away.
"It's a nationwide issue, and particularly when you transition to new equipment you see that some of your traditional poll workers decide it's time to retire," said DeGregorio, of the Election Assistance Commission. "So it puts the election officials in a bind in trying to fill the polls."
Although most poll workers are retirees who don't have to sacrifice a day of work to work the polls, states across the country are reaching out to younger generations, who have grown up using computers.
In Chicago, 754 high school students have been recruited to work the polls. Those younger than 18 are allowed to work as judges under a state law designed to involve younger people in the voting process, according to a news release. The city has also trained 2,000 college students to work as technicians at every polling place to prevent the kinds of problems that affected the city's primary this March.
( I suppose in red-states like OH and FL, they are only hiring students and young with solid Repug/radical-right credentials! :lol )
In Ohio, Cuyahoga County has turned poll worker training over to the local community college, which has extended sessions by an hour and limited the class sizes. People must pass a written exam before they can serve as poll workers on Election Day.
Staff writers Zachary A. Goldfarb, Rosalind S. Helderman and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.