Spring Beauty - First Flower of the Season

Not many people voted here in the February primary but we had a nice turn out for this election.    Most of the voters hadn't used (and didn't even know) that we had a new voting machine.  I'm furious with the people who spread lies about voting fraud in the last presidential election.  That has made voters overly concerned about any change to the system.  In the past, our voters could choose to vote by paper ballot or by a touch screen.  The people who only ever used paper were happy to still have a paper ballot but questioned feeding it into the tabulator machine so it could automatically register their selections.  The people who loved using the touch screen thought it a step backward technologically and wished the screen on the tabulator would display who they voted for when they fed in their ballot.   Had a couple of people ask if it was a Dominion machine - some were joking but some weren't.  One lady walked around the machine to see if it was "connected to the Internet".   While our machine isn't,  I'm not sure what she was looking for.  Another person thought the tabulator shredded the ballots when it was fed in.  I explained that all ballots were left in-tact should we need to go back and recount after an election.  There was a couple who had noted the number given them in poll book (they were voters #66 & 67 for instance) but when they fed their ballots into the tabulator it said a total of 65 ballots were counted so far for the day.  I thought that was pretty sharp of them to notice the discrepancy.  I explained we had opened and run the absentee ballots through the tabulator just before they came in but had issues with two of the ballots.  I was waiting on a call back from the county clerk about how handle them.  In past elections, by law, if the majority of the poll workers agreed that the voter's intent was obvious, we would fix the ballot and count it.    However, even though all the poll workers agreed that the voter's intent was known, that our decision and action in fixing the ballot would be noted on the Election Incident Report, there had been a lot of finger pointing during last year's elections when absentee ballots had been fixed.  So I decided to call the the county clerk to get an official okey-dokey on filling in the little circles where the voter had made check marks.   It would seem I too have been affected by those election fraud lies.  I'll blow off some steam by sending an e-mail to my senator who still claims the election was 'stolen'.