Have any voting stories to tell?

I had my second bad experience with a Sequoia optical scan machine today (the first was in April).

I filled out my ballot, tried to feed it through the machine, and it beeped and spit it back out.

Election judge comes over and tells me to try again.

I do, same thing happens.

"Oh, you must have filled your ballot out wrong", they say.

I check, it's fine.

They tell me to try again, I do, ballot spit back out.

Then they pass my ballot from judge to judge, to check that I actually did fill it out correctly (because of COURSE it couldn't be the machine). So much for the secrecy of my vote!

This goes on for 3 minutes. I ask one of them if they keep a record of how often this happens. "The machine records it on the receipt tape", they tell me. Then I wonder if they compare the tape to the results when the polls close.

They feel the sides of the ballot and ask me if I've ripped anything off the side. WTF? No, of course not. Again, it must be me and not that machine.

Finally, they invalidate that ballot (I watched them do it) and they gave me a new one. It worked.

The more I use these machines, the more certain I am that the system is broken. I just hope I'm not the only one who notices and is trying to change it.

But I couldn't get over the feeling that I was feeding it into a shredder.

No problems at all voting or feeding it in there, but I had the same feeling when I saw the big giant Diebold logo >_<

Other than that it was pertty simple. Walk in, show my voter card, vote, turn in the ballot and leave.