Goldfinch in Winter

Public test of the Voting machine today.  It's always done within 10 days before every election and the date and time is printed in the newspaper the week before.  You would think those people accussing voting machines of changing counts would want to come and participate in a test of the system using real ballots.  Instead they would rather carp about imagined faults rather than be proven wrong.  To be fair, though, no one at all ever shows up for the test.  Chief Inspector Barb and I met at the appointed time in the town hall.  We set up the voting machine (actually it's just a tabulator).  We checked that the printed ballot was correct.  We voted for everyone on the ballot and checked that the counts came out correctly.  That's when I picked up the voter assist module.  It's built to aid people w/ disabilities create a ballot on their own.  We don't have anyotne who has asked to use it but I wanted to run through the process in case someone did.  All went well until it came time for the tabulator to mark the ballot.  A message "Ballot Error.  Call Poll Worker." appeared on the screen.   The error message wasn't anywhere in the manual that came w/ the tabulator.  Called Command Central.  They said the printer head probably needed to be cleaned.  We looked through the manual again - no explanation on how to clean the printer head much less where it was located.  Took awhile but we finally unscrewed a back metal piece, pushed together two silver metal tabs, pushed up on either side of the top of the inkjet holder and then tipped the ink holder down toward us to get access to the jet's head.   For grins, both Barb and I checked to see if there was a video on-line of how to clean an inkjet on this kind of tabulator.  Nope.  We are ready for the election next week.  Hope the voters have done their homework also.