Touch Screen Machine Scaring Off Senior Citizen Election Judges

from the unintended-consequences dept

Well, here's a completely unexpected consequence of Maryland going to all touchscreen voting systems: the election judges who watch over the voting process, who are mostly senior citizens, are scared off by the high-tech machines. The old voting system, they could handle. However, understanding a touchscreen voting system when many of them are still shying away from computers is too much. And, apparently, it's not easy to find election judges, so when they scare off a good percentage of the usual crowd, there's a definite shortage.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Moggy, 13 Feb 2004 @ 11:54am

    Old-style and seniors are an election nightmare!!

    I'm in charge of an election precinct in my city -- possibly the only non-senior citizen doing the task in the area, based on who showed up at the training session. I *wish* we'd go to electronic; the old paper method is a bureaucratic nightmare, and involves more potential (or real) mishaps than anybody not working the precincts can imagine. There's no level of computer error that can match the level of the problems we ran into, and there's no degree of electronic corruption that makes up for what careful volunteers could easily get away with.

    The fact that we rely on (often extremely old) seniors without screening them to make sure they're not senile or seriously prejudiced is an additional problem. One of the two that was on my team last time was so negligent (possible dementia) that I spent most of my time "cleaning up" the havoc he caused. He also insulted quite a few voters with horrendous racist/misogynistic/homophobic comments, as if almost nullifying several hundred votes wasn't enough.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.