Diebold, Die!
I voted for the first time in at least four years (and possibly for the first time since 2000). In Oxford, Ohio, on an electronic machine created by Diebold, the bete noire of all manner of voting conspiracists (as I said in reason's presidential poll, I tapped the screen for one Bob Barr). This was my first time with such an apparatus—I grew up in New Jersey, where we voted on steampunk-clanky mechanical machines involving flipped switches and pulled levers and all sorts of weirdly old-fashioned seeming stuff. There was something comforting about having to exert yourself to cast a ballot, though it seemed kind of implausible that anyone was really tabulating whatever the hell was on the inside of the machine (indeed, in the Garden State and New York, stories would always come out weeks after a given election of whole tractor trailers filled with voting machines simply disappearing).
The Diebold electronic screen was not comforting in the least, though it seemed easy and transparent enough to use. There was a paper tape that you could read as the vote was tabulated, etc.
As we wait for the polls to close and the results to come in, I'm curious if Hit & Run readers care much about the technology of voting. And what interesting (or like mine, uninteresting) experiences did you have today?
AP story on machines not malfunctioning, big turnout, and the like.
