Boston's new voting machines face first citywide test
The new machines require voters to fill out ballots as if taking an SAT test and to feed them into a small white scanner, which registers the vote and drops the ballot into a bin for safekeeping. At a demonstration last week at St. Cecilia's House, a senior center in the Fenway, five elderly women crowded around one of the new machines, asking questions of a translator in rapid-fire Russian.Why? Why? Why?
'How do you fill out the ovals?' one wanted to know.
Why are we having old Russian voters fill in ovals?
We do we even have ovals?
People are going to mark their ballots incorrectly. They are going to put an X on the oval, they are going to place a checkmark on the oval, and they are going to incompletly fill in the oval.
D'oh!
Why can we just have a ballot like they have in Peabody, where you draw a straight line to complete an arrow that looks like this: -- -->