Brown Thrasher in Plum Tree

The town clerk let me know there would be a demo of the new voting machine at the County Court House today and if I wanted to attend, there would be a place for me.   I'd gone through the training session before we got the new voting machine but figured now that I had used it twice ('in anger' as the Brits put it) I would be able to pick up on the nuances of how it operated.  This time around I learned there is a mode you can set so the screen shows how you voted when it reads the ballot.  That was one request we'd had from voters in the last election.  Also learned that if, heaven forbid, we should run out of ballots, we can duplicate more on a copier but should not attempt to run them through the tabulator.  There is a locked box w/ a slot in the back where we can put ballots that need to be hand-counted after the polls close.  Good to know - the last thing you want is to have more voters than ballots! I also learned that the error we had received when booting up was a bug that would be fixed in the next release.  (Sounds like old times.)   I had a good meeting.  The presenter didn't.  The tabulator kicked out every ballot he entered.   He brought in a second one and it didn't do any better.  He handled the setback well  and both I and the County Clerk vouched that the tabulator worked better than the old machines.  I'd figured the meeting would only go an hour but it took over twice as long.   Every town rep in attendance had stories they wanted to relate about elections.  Some were trying to make a point and some  ... well ... just wanted to talk.  The presenter let everyone have their say.   Though I would have been OK w/o the hair-dyed-dark/deeply tanned/heavily-made-up clerk who looked around the room and pronounced herself "... the youngest person here."