Just so you don't think I only complain about electronic balloting,
here's my whining about the paper ones.
Why did it take me 16 minutes to fill in my ballot even though I already had all my selections pre-marked on my "sample ballot"?
Fortunately, we ditched the electronic voting machines several elections back.
(California has another election seemingly every 6 hours.)
Well, (1) I always triple-check ballots just like I do tax forms
(according to Dan W as well as empirical evidence from the State of Florida most people can't be
so bothered to spend a little extra time on these little things like death, war, and taxes),
and (2) I had one of those "draw the line between two arrows" ballots.
Strangely, there was some interaction between the roller in the ballpoint pen and the ink on the left half of the arrow.
On every single line (drawing left to right), the pen would pick up a little wax(?) or otherwise be confused
by skipping down off the ballot ink and it would leave a small gap before the start of the line.
I.e., the whole point of this ballot is to provide an unbroken line from one side to the other.
But the pen left a small gap on the left side of every line.
So I had to go back and ink in the gap.
Kind of weird. And I assume this is not at all a common problem.
Just worth whining about a little bit.
Further complaints, as I have mentioned here before, all of our ballots go into an unlocked cardboard box!
I suppose that's better than the false sense of security I'd get if they went into a locked metal box to which every single pollworker had the key....
But still, paper ballot security is non-existent at my polling station, other than that I got to tear a numbered receipt off of the end of my ballot.
I think I had mentioned here that in previous elections, the pollworker would look at your ballot as he placed it into the cardboard box.
That was remedied a while back with a confidentiality sleeve that you wrap around the ballot as you personally drop it into the cardboard box.
Now the pollworkers have to wait to read and/or modify your ballot until after you leave!