Takin' the Blog for a Walk
Join Waukesha resident Brien Lee and his blog, Sir Fido, as they explore the city and report on the interesting things they find.
Email Brien at howlinblog@yahoo.com.
you work 16 hours, what do you get?
Put in sixteen hours at the polls yesterday helping make sure your vote counted. If you'd been an observer at District 8 polls in the City of Waukesha yesterday you would've seen 13 hours of smooth and trouble-free operation by six of Waukesha's most dedicated poll workers book-ended by strange incidents at the 7:00 a.m. opening and 8:00 p.m. close.
One of our first voters in the morning had an overvoted ballot that for some reason wouldn't spit back out, but would get stuck in the machine. We had to open up the ballot box twice to free the ballot all while people late for work stood waiting to use the machine.
Due to changes in reporting results to the county, the city wanted our two totals tapes right away at end of voting. We actually had a city representative standing by waiting for them. We were anticipating 8:00 p.m. and knew what we had to do. The whole day ran smoothly and we had only a few minutes left. At five minutes to close or less we had a couple enter. They weren't in the right location, but too late to vote anywhere else. Said they looked it up on city website and were informed to vote at our location. Made three separate calls to city clerk's office to find out what should be done, all the while keeping the city employee waiting for our tapes. When I got home I checked the website and never could find the error the voters mentioned.
All City of Waukesha polling locations got new ballot scan machines this year. April's election demonstrated to us how sensitive the machines were when ballot after ballot were rejected because some pencil marks were made too dark. Yesterday, the entire city used pens, rather nice ones actually, to mark ballots. The only rejected ballots we saw yesterday were the overvoted ones where electors wanted to vote for one Republican and one Democratic governor. The pens worked perfectly!
We didn't have any issues with absentee ballots. Absentees for the city are all counted at City Hall now.
The first time in Wisconsin's over 160 year history there's a recall primary for governor - and only the third time in the entire history of the United States. If you voted yesterday, or absentee like I did, you were taking part in history.
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