Voter privacy failure

[bunsen_h]

I just voted in the provincial election.  There was a concerning incident.

The way it's supposed to work is that one brings one's marked ballot in a privacy sleeve to the person who's running the ballot scanner.  That person inserts the ballot-in-sleeve part way into a slot in the scanner.  The scanner plucks the ballot out of the sleeve.  The operator then puts the sleeve away, I assume for reuse.

The operator was having trouble getting the scanner to take in the ballots.  It looked like an alignment problem: the ballot-in-sleeve had to be inserted quite precisely, or the scanner would pull the ballot in part way, then go into reverse and push the ballot out again.  The operator knew that this was a recurring problem.  But she took the sleeve away before the ballot had been processed, so when the scanner went into reverse, my ballot was almost completely exposed to view.  My vote was visible to the operator.  She put the ballot back into the sleeve and went through the process again, and after a couple more tries, the job was completed.

I reported the problem to the polling-place supervisor.  She said that she would make an incident report.  She assured me that only the person who'd issued the ballot to me knew my name, and that the machine operator had no way to connect my identity with my vote.  I pointed out that if she'd already known me personally, that wouldn't help.  The problem wouldn't have occurred at all if only she'd waited to take the sleeve away until the ballot had been fully processed.  It was while I was walking home that it occurred to me that I am, in my own way, fairly distinctive.  People tend to remember me.  There aren't a lot of really short men walking around wearing octopus hats.

Comments

[gorgeousgary]

Interesting. Here in Maryland the volunteers show you how to feed your ballot into the scanner but leave the individual voter to actually do it. So the volunteer never sees what's inside the sleeve.

[bunsen_h]

There was another incident, more weird than concerning. The first step in the process is picking up one's ballot. The easy way to do it is to present one's voter registration card and photo ID to the poll worker. (There are procedures to handle less simple cases, such as not having the registration card, having moved / changed one's name without updating the registry, etc.)

When I handed my card and driver's license to the poll worker, she looked at them, and asked if they were for my husband.

Granted, not much of my face was showing, because of the N95 mask and hat I had on. But surely "this person is the one identified by the card and the ID they've handed me" is more likely than "this person is the spouse of the one identified by the card and ID"? My voice is generally identified as male when I'm using my normal speaking tones, and my face was showing enough hair to strongly indicate that I am male. It's possible that I could be married to a guy, of course, but it wouldn't be the way to bet.

[beable]

I am startled you had scanners because my polling station was stuff in a box that theyd be counting by hand at the end of the day (it was still designed to be stuffed in the box with privacy though).

I guess it depends on size of polling station. mine is in my apartment building, maybe they put small ones in buildings with high senior populations.