Local Twitterato Matt Ashburn, who owned the now-defunct Capital City Diner, has been tweeting up a storm about his apparently hellish time voting at his Trinidad polling place at the Delta Towers Apartments on Florida Avenue NE: a long wait, building security advocating for their candidates of choice. He didn’t finish voting—-well, he didn’t finish trying to finish voting—-until well after 9 p.m. He sent in a few sentences:
Big bottleneck inside- several people checking voter rolls, then one line for ballots. After filling out ballot, the scanner was down…
…so the precinct captain told me to just give him my ballot & he would make sure it gets counted. Tossed in pile of ballots.
Aside from concerns w/ long lines and other disorganization, the process tonight at precinct 77 violated 2 big tenets of election integrity:
1) Voters must have faith in the system; that is, they must know their vote is counted.
And 2) voters must be able to have a private ballot to discourage intimidation, etc.
Yikes.
Photo courtesy Matt Ashburn