I just voted.

In Baltimore County, we use the new Diebold electronic voting machines which are little more than tablet computers, hackable by monkeys, and powered — apparently — by Windows.

Scary, huh?

I will concede that they were surprisingly easy to use, though the UI was a tad ugly. I really would have liked my signed slip to have had my vote printed on it, or punched into it, instead of just being stuck into a pocket on the side of the voting booth side panel for, I don’t know, posterity or something.

And that’s another thing — when did voting lose it’s privacy factor? I remember going to the polls at the fire hall with my mother (when I was little), and seeing big blue curtains around the voting booth. (Then we’d go get Election Day soup from the Ladies Auxiliary … mmm.) Now-a-days we just have little plastic lunch trays on either side that hide absolutely nothing from the Helpful Poll Workers peering over our shoulders, offering advice and making sure we don’t screw up our civic duty.

I do understand that some people potentially won’t be able to figure out the electronic voting systems (thereby putting a large percentage of the voting public at a civic disadvantage), but I really wouldn’t mind having those curtains back, or at least more than a foot side-to-side between voting machines. Besides, my grandmother seemed to figure hers out all right.

The best part of all was the message on the ballot review screen, which went something like this:

Take care when using the downward scroll bar button, that you don’t accidentally click the Cast Ballot button prematurely.

Having to even consider displaying a message like this simply screams of poor design (never mind that there was no scroll bar on the screen anyway). Maybe I can design the machines we use next election.

<sarcasm> Hey, if we follow this trend and use a different system each year, then we can continue to limit the privilege of voting to the young and tech-savvy. How progressive would that be? </sarcasm>