I suppose it might simplify setting up the machines to have separate polling places, but what happens to third parties?
I’m in a very red area and we managed to share machines, but it isn’t a big city. And we have the new ones with paper ballot printout. One problem is that races with multiple candidates may require a second display screen. The Democratic presidential ballot required 2 screens, and apparently some people took that as evidence of an Evil Plot. I am a bit more computer savvy, so I easily found the “next screen” indicator.
I was amused when the worker checking me in showed me a sign taped to the table. I could point to my party affiliation rather than say it out loud. I have no idea if this is part of voting law, or if they put it there for the benefit of us vastly outnumbered Democrats.
That’s good advice. I voted early but drove away from the polling place near my house because it was obvious that the parking lot was full (which means a line inside and I can’t stand for long periods). Because I have a car and time, I could go to a polling place on the other side of town. Not everyone has that luxury.
Oh great. Bernie voters are going to say they were the ones affected.
Dress rehearsal for november voter discouragement in case of TX blue wave.
They keep coming up with excuses for this, but IDK how they can do it after this. Yes, I am naive, but how do people not question this if they don’t correct it?
When I heard the ad for Senokot, they had a new ginger product. Who among us thought the product was for red heads before a brain reset? 
Advocates usually praise the vote center model because it lets voters chose where they cast their ballots.
There’s another model that allows voters to choose where they cast their ballot that doesn’t lead to these eff ups…Vote-by-Mail
Not an evil plot, just common industry knowledge that the candidates who can be accessed only by clicking a “more” button are at a statistically significant disadvantage. Thus the questions about whether the systems are taking appropriate remediation measures such as randomizing which candidates appear on the second (and third) screen. This ain’t conspiracy theory, it is basic defense against ratfucking and incompetence.
So many people keep talking as if this crap is unintentional. Or even normal. It’s neither.
I live and vote in Harris County and agree with your suspicion. The dedication of voting machines was probably a big problem, maybe the big problem. Heavily Democratic areas probably had 50% of their voting machines, the “Republican” machines, sitting unused while the “Democratic” machines were in heavy demand.
In this case, the candidates were listed in alphabetical order. As you say, someone has to make a call on how to handle the situation fairly. And it’s a sad commentary on voters’ general intelligence that they will pick from the first page - which means that they didn’t walk in having a preferred candidate.
I heard the same complaints about the GOP congressional primary ballot (minibus worth of candidates). Some people are determined to see sinister forces at work no matter what.
We don’t have separate polling places, we have separate machines that are dedicated to a particular party at each polling place. That’s only for the primaries, not the general, and when you sign in you declare the party primary in which you want to vote.
We managed to get all the Dem presidential primary candidates on one screen, but once you go through screen after screen after screen and check to make sure your vote was recorded correctly, you press “cast ballot” and then… nothing. You leave, and can only hope the machine actually did register your vote correctly and that it will get counted.
More like a brain dump for the Oval Occupant.
We had those until this year. People are a bit slower using them (new machines) so far.
In a bond election last fall, the elections people misplaced a box of the paper ballots, leading to a mismatch during the recounts. What fun.
Texas does have a reputation, but most of the article is talking about Harris County in Houston, which is currently run by Democrats. I think in this case, it is more unintentional than not, though the GOP were clearly ratfucking by refusing to allow Dems to use their voting stations, knowing full well that there would be much higher Dem turnout this election.
It doesn’t really have much to do with elections, per se. Any Big Data person in tech can tell you that the number of people who look at page 2 or below the fold on any web page is close to 0. It’s just not how people interact with their screens.
The majority of people in the country (the world really) aren’t political junkies like those of us who frequent places like TPM. So it’s more understandable that they aren’t totally committed to one candidate and most of them have other more immediate priorities than reading up on all the candidates and deciding which one truly stands for their values. To me, it’s more of a sad commentary on the state of living where people can’t afford to take that time (though they did clearly take the time to wait in line, so they did have some dedication to the voting process, even if they didn’t necessary exercise it fully by viewing additional pages).
Oregon has voted by mail for many years now. It is so sensible that I cannot imagine an equally efficient and trustworthy alternative. States that persist in unreliable and inefficient systems must have some reasons for doing so, and I don’t think I would find those reasons very convincing.
I agree with you except that people should be prepared to vote and know who they are voting for before they get in line. I know…some people just don’t do that. This time though, it really matters so I hope people get themselves as prepared to vote as possible. It’s not that hard.
Nah, they just hate Democrats of every persuasion.
Oh, dear, how long before the Sanders campaign starts to lambaste the Texas results as illegitimate, the result of eViL Corporate Democrats who used the funds from Big Everything to stop the country from Feeling the Bern!
I’d say we could almost make a drinking game out of this, but we’d all be alcoholics by Saturday…
I was in Madrid, Spain for the last election. My wife has dual citizenship and had voted early. I had never been to an election out of this country. Boy, what a well oiled democracy machine I saw . The vote in Spain was on a Sunday, and the election center we went to,with my wife’s friend, was in a school. There were poll watchers from all the party’s there and all identifications were required and then the paper ballot.
In short, the election was over and done with and a count was done and checked and done again to certify. The results were posted and that was that. Why in the hell can’t we perform the simplest of tasks like voting? Send someone to Europe to see how it’s done.