Re my above rant, full disclosure: I'm a career state Elections Officer. So, my bias is in favor of my professional brethren. (Siblren? Sistern??)/ Anyway, for those interested in dreary reality as distinguished from the joys of political condemnation and gnostic perfectionism, here's a good article (from a very non-Bushie newspaper btw)--pasted in full 'cause I dunno how long it will stay on the website:

washingtonpost.com
Fla. Vote Uncovers a Problem: Overwhelmed Poll Workers

By Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 14, 2002; Page A0

Florida discovered this week that spending $100 million did not eliminate the weakest link in its election system -- poll workers overwhelmed and turned off by the increasingly complex demands made on a group that has traditionally been mostly retired seniors.

Voting precincts opened hours late and counts were delayed because poll workers did not show up, did not know how to deal with the demands of managing sophisticated computer-based voting machines or quit in the middle of the day.

"Your service support is a bunch of 70-year-old volunteers, who, if they don't feel like working or are confused, won't work. They walk out. That's essentially what happened," said Stephen Ansolabehere, co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Study, created after Florida's 2000 fiasco.

The state notorious for voting problems was just the worst victim of a national trend. Election supervisors say they struggle to recruit volunteers and are left holding the bag when trained workers do not show up or quit. Election reform and fancy new technology do not solve the problem, they make it worse. Demanding rapid change nationwide could spread Florida's problems. "What almost killed Florida was this unholy thing that has developed where we're seeing larger and larger numbers of poll workers not show up," said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center in Houston. "We're seeing higher numbers of no-shows than we've ever seen before. Any state that changed a lot of its stuff. If you expect too much of poll workers, they get overwhelmed and they're not sure if they can do the job and they just don't show up.

"Federal election reform might create the same problem by changing everything at once. Politicians have to remember that implementation is important and you can't just edict changes and expect it to come off automatically."

Conny McCormack, who has been running elections in Los Angeles for seven years, fears new demands from Washington. "Elections are in danger of collapsing under the weight of their own complexity," she said. "There have been so many new laws passed in states; the accelerated rate of change has created a new environment, yet we have the old structure. Look at the polling place and it's the same faces, the retirees. The new [touch-screen] equipment is too heavy. I saw an 80-year-old poll worker lifting these things of out his car. I'm not going to ask my 80-year-old volunteers to do that."

McCormack was in South Florida on Tuesday to watch the implementation of new touch-screen voting booths first hand. Poll worker problems are not new to McCormack. For her primary election in March, she had recruited 25,000 volunteers, but 20 percent bailed out. "It was abdication," she said, "defection at the level of a meltdown."

What saved McCormack was another growing trend: replacing volunteer poll workers with government workers on loan from other departments. County employees offer a stable pool of workers who have some technical competence and are used to following bureaucratic procedures.

Several supervisors said that the historic pool of volunteers is, by definition, people who would not otherwise be working on a Tuesday.

"The people available to work Election Day do not have the skills that we need," said Sharon Turner Buie, director of the Kansas City Election Board. "Recruiting is almost impossible. As everyone knows now, it's a nationwide problem. The problems are not the equipment. It's the people who have to work it."

For Tuesday's Florida primary, Miami-Dade election supervisor David Leahy turned to county employees to help in his precincts. But Leahy's plan was overwhelmed by too many changes at once. Reapportionment of legislative districts was only completed in Florida in mid-summer, contributing to confusion about where people should vote. Leahy needed someone with a laptop computer in each precinct to look up the names of people who swore they were registered to vote but were not on the voting list at that polling place. Because the database search was considered the more complex chore and training time was limited, the county employees were trained for searching registered voters, but not trained on booting up the new touch-screen voting equipment. Last-minute changes in instructions for starting the touch-screen equipment then created chaos with the volunteers.

In Maryland, Prince George's County had a smooth transition Tuesday to touch-screen voting. Linda Lamone, administrator of the State Board of Elections, said Prince George's had a large crew of roving technicians from the county's computer department as well as other county employees working the polls.

Kansas City and surrounding counties encourage companies to make a civic contribution by loaning employees to work at polling stations or encouraging workers to use vacation days. Connecticut, Ohio and some other jurisdictions recruit high school or college students, including those too young to register to vote, to volunteer at the polls as a public service project.

Election officials fear that increasing complexity has all but killed the traditional system.

"We've added provisional ballots and the new voting equipment," said Lamone. "We have various new federal laws, new electioneering requirements on where they can be. They have to make sure people don't wear inappropriate things in the polling place. It's no longer this sort of neighborhood thing where everybody knows each other and go down to the local fire hall kind of thing. We were short the number of people we should have had on Election Day in probably 75 percent of Maryland jurisdictions."

The task force that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) appointed to make recommendations for solving the 2000 problem explicitly noted that technology was not the shortcoming {ndash} people were. As he began his examination of the latest Florida mishaps, Mark Pritchett, executive director of the task force, said most reformers had been enthusiastic about the broad changes, but were not interested in the nitty-gritty of applying them at the local level.

"It doesn't matter what technology or what rules you have in place," he said. "It won't do any good if you don't have good people on the ground doing it. I found it hard to believe that poll workers wouldn't even show it, that they would come that late. It bolsters the argument that we need to get government workers out doing other things like running the machines."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company