Kaylee ,'Shindig'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
OK, is anyone else really stressed-out about this election?
Among other things.
I guarantee if the GOP keeps either house of Congress, Bush will be talking "mandate". Again.
I don't know. After Ted Haggard got into trouble this weekend when his mandates were disclosed, people may stop using the word for a while.
I have reached the end of the internets, and I still have an hour left to go.
Send help.
I have the same problem, shrift.
I should be writing up meeting note. Bleh.
I'm refreshing my inbox and hoping someone gives me work to do. And that's just sick and wrong.
Guess the logo. Harder than it sounds.
My part of MA uses Scantron voting -- you get a big fat paper ballot (on paper not unlike light cardboard) and vote by connecting arrows with a big fat Magic Marker. Then you take the paper ballot over to a machine that reads the votes optically and stores the actual paper ballot that gets trucked to the vote warehouse so that if there's a recount needed they can be reprocessed.
Speaking as a person who works with computer databases for a living, this is the best of both worlds -- you have swift and easy processing, but you can easily double-check your results in a publically verifiable manner.
It astounds me that anyone EVER thought the Diebold voting machines were a good idea.
We have the same machines Theo describes. They really do solve the problems of both hanging chad and COMPLETE FUCKING LACK OF ANY RECORDS quite nicely. And, bonus, you use a special magic marker that isn't just a normal marker, and anything that comes with special markers is extra-cool.
Still, though, no ka-CHUNK.
The Scantron itself makes a nice little hummmm though. Still, I do miss the ka-CHUNK.
But voting in Somerville never had a ka-CHUNK (in my lifetime, anyway), so there's no loss there. I'm obsessed with Scantron voting, and don't understand why it's not universal. Except then I remember all of the people who think the ka-CHUNK means voting.
I feel quite certain that a simulated kaTHUNK noise could be worked into the design of the optical scanner voting machines. There could even be a lever to pull when you put the paper in to be scanned. It would be the World's Best Voting System!