Sun Pillar

Public Test for the upcoming April 7th non-partisan election this morning.  As usual no one from the public showed up so it was only Chief Inspector Andy and I running the test.   I can only assume my neighbors don't believe the President when he claims the 2020 election was stolen or they would come out to make sure their ballot will be counted correctly.   Andy and I talked about how we would run this election.  

• First because the County Board Rep is on the ballot we have three different ballots depending on which ward the voter lives in.  Most of our town is in Ward 1 and it has a white band at the top of that ballot.  Ward 2 has maybe 75 people and that has an orange band at the top.  Ward 3 has 25 voters and that has a blue band at the top.  We will use the poker chips.  The poll book states not only which ward the voter is in but this time also has printed "WHITE, "ORANGE", or "BLUE".  When the voter signs in they will receive either a white, red, or blue poker chip depending on which ward they live in.  (Red is as close to orange as we could get.)  To receive a ballot they give the poker chip to another poll worker who gives them a ballot based on the color chip that they present.  We've used poker chips before and they work fairly well.  
• The second issue for this election is going to be counting ballots.  People may write in anyone they want for an office but normally those write-in's don't count.  They only count if there is no candidate on the ballot for that office and there are no registered write-in candidates for that office.  That is the case for three of the races this time.  Still, not a problem since at the end of the night the machine nicely spits out a list of all of the voter write-in's.  The problem is that the tabullator only counts those write-in's if the little oval next to the blank write-in line is also filled in - indicating that the voter wants to write in a name.  Our state legislature feels that if someone took the trouble to write in a name, whether or not the little oval is filled in is irrelevant, they want to vote for that person.  So Andy and I agreed for those three races w/ no candidates we will need to hand-count all ballots.  That will take a little longer at the end of an already long day.  
• The third issue for this election is a combination of the first two.  One of the races is for School Board Rep.  All of my town is in one school district so that's the same race for all three wards.   For that race you can vote for up to three candidates but there are no candidates running for that office.  As we count write-ins we will need to be cognisant of aliases (James v. Jim, Susan v. Sue, etc.), spelling differences (Mayer v. Meyer, Smith v. Smyth, etc.), and bad penmanship.  Any questions and the majority of the poll workers decide.   Thankfully for the last few years no one has written in cartoon names.    The newspaper would have a field day if  "Micky Mouse"  became our County Rep.