MrPikes, Election Officer

Last night I attended Henrico County, Virginia’s Election Officer Training. It took an hour. I am given to understand that it might have gone longer, but apparently West Virginia was playing Louisville (Go Mountaineers!).

I decided to volunteer as an election worker for two reasons:

1. Coming from a technical background I thought I might be helpful.
2. I genuinely want to participate in our election process.

At 34 years of age, I stuck out like a pregnant prom queen – the average age of election workers being 70 – but I was prepared for that. I was less prepared for the Pledge of Allegiance (I politely stood, with my hands at my sides), and was even less prepared for the social aspect of the gathering. A lot of my fellow volunteers knew each other, which makes sense in retrospect, but at the time I would not have been surprised to see people begin producing casseroles.

Around 40 of us went to a separate room to receive training on the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines. Henrico uses Advanced Voting Solutions WinVote machines, which my friend Gokmop wrote about last year.

The fact that they communicate with each other wirelessly for end-of-election tabulation still concerns me deeply. Wireless is inherently more insecure than wired, even with badass encryption, and 128-bit WEP (which is what WinVote uses) is demonstrably lame.

The training was exclusively confined to the setup and operation of the machines. Not one word was spoken about what to do when the machines malfunctioned. Presumably the Chiefs and Assistant Chiefs receive more thorough training on what to do when things go wrong, and there is always the Registrar hotline to fall back on. Still, I felt like the omission had more to do with convincing the poll workers that the machines were reliable. I saw a lot of wide eyes during our training.

Here’s a little thought experiment – imagine overhearing the following at a voting precinct using paper ballots:

Chief, this stylus won’t move. Can you come over here and unbudge it?

Sir, can you help me? I’m trying to punch this hole, but it keeps unpunching itself.

I need another ballot. The one I was using just crumpled itself up, then burst into flames.

Um, what problem were we trying to solve again?