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Where to vote
By adamg on Tue, 09/06/2022 - 9:55am
The Secretary of State's office has a form that lets you see where your polling place is and who's on the ballot today.
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Comments
New System?
When I went to vote this morning there was a new system for the election workers where they checked people in on an iPad and not the big binder of paper addresses. I gave them my name and they asked to confirm my street. No check-out confirmation as in the past either.
The ballot and ballot eater was the same.
I'm curious if this new system is being used statewide or if Medford was early/late to the party.
In Somerville
Still the great big paper book.
Wow
I am shocked Medford beat Somerville to anything.
Generally Medford prides itself on being 15 years behind Somerville.
Now I'm curious if it was my ward (near city hall) or the whole city.
Why is there check-out?
I've never understood the reason for the check-out step. What purpose does it serve?
Double safe
If I stole a stack of ballots and there were no checkout procedure, I could just bring them back one at a time and slowly feed them into the reader during the day.
You could do that anyway
Just walk up to the machine while the attendants are busy with someone else and not paying attention.
Either way someone would probably notice if someone grabbed a stack of blank ballots and/or walked into the polling site already holding a ballot.
I always figured the check-out procedure was to double-check you were marked off the list correctly.
Hard to sneak past
At my polling place, access to the ballot counting machine is via a bottleneck that takes you right past the checkout table; it would be very hard to stuff a ballot into it if you hadn't come through the line and checked out properly.
Somerville no longer had the check-out step today
I checked in, I received and marked a ballot, I fed it into the machine, and then I just left.
Paper binders are still used...
...both for checking in and checking out in Ward 14 which includes all or parts of: South Dorchester; Mattapan; Roxbury and Franklin Field. They're more like bound pamphlets than binders though.