“I’d seen lots of passing references to problems with the voting keypads being used in the House of Deputies on several blogs this morning. But John Burwell spells it out in great and amusing detail (or perhaps that should be AGONIZING detail!):
We had a grand time being incredulous at what was transpiring on the floor of the house. It had to do with those now infamous keypads.
Before the vote for Church Pension Fund elections there was another instruction on how to use the keypads – same rehearsal as before – we voted for the top songs of the Episcopal Church. There were 147 invalid ballots cast. That means about 20% of the folks couldn’t figure out how to cast a vote on the keypad. A delegate made the motion that we use paper ballots. Because the Aye and the Nay was about equal, we needed to use the keypads to decide whether or not they would use the keypads for the Pension Fund vote. Mercy!
358 yes, 435 no – 54% They will use the keypads.
Someone made the comment that there were more mistakes here than there were with the hanging chads in Florida.
A motion was passed that says if the scanning results show more than 10% errors we will move to paper ballots.
They try to vote, get through one name, and the process screeches to a halt. Turns out that they got a name mistranslated in the Spanish version of the Blue Book. It took 15 minutes to get this glitch ironed out.
This is the largest comedy of errors I’ve witnessed so far. Unbelievable!
“Add to this account the fact that the whole episode took about an hour and a half to get through. It was a singular example of using an inappropriate technology to solve a problem. We ended up more than 10% spoilt so the whole thing was for naught and we’ll be using paper ballots this morning. -Nick
(Via GenCon06.)
