Yellow Pond Lily

Election  next week so Friend Barb and I got together this morning at the town hall for the public test of the tabulator and to ensure we had everything necessary for the election.  Barb brought along her great grandson 9 year old Conner.   Once we had gone through machine setup and the "polls" were open, we started "voting".  Conner was getting antsy.  We gave him the task of putting ballots into the tabulator to be counted.  That was a shocker.  With no prior training or seeing anyone vote, he located where the ballot goes (there are two large white arrows showing the slot), fed the ballot into the slot, and recognized that a bell rings if the ballot was accepted or a blinking red sign on the screen means the ballot was rejected.  He even figured out which button to push to get the rejected ballot returned (it is also blinking red.)   Nothing against voters but about a third of them can't find the machine's slot or check that their ballot was accepted/rejected.   We closed our "polls", zeroed out the counts, and Barb applied seals on the machine.  I checked the paper ballots we had marked against the machine's tally.  Not an easy task.  This is a partisan primary: voters can only vote for candidates in one party.  There are five parties.  To help, the ballot first requests the voter indicate which party they will be voting for.  Should a person vote outside of that party, that portion of the ballot is not counted.   Took awhile but all counts meshed.  Feel sorry for anyone counting hundreds of ballots like these by hand.