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March 9, 2004

People are Dumb

It seems that in the recent election, Orange County poll workers gave 7,000 people bad ballots.

In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters.

Wide margins in most races seem likely to spare the county the need for a costly revote. But the problems, which county officials have blamed on insufficient training for poll workers, are a strong indication of the pitfalls facing officials as they try to bring new election technology online statewide.

The problem is not insufficient training. Every time they say that I think of my one time as a poll worker, when it took all of five minutes for me to learn how to hand out ballots and get it right, but everybody else needed to have it repeated a hundred times. The problem is that most people are just too stupid to work at the polls without constant supervision.

I've been thinking about this this semester, taking three art classes as I am. It seems to me that the way art classes should work is that the teacher expains how to do something, shows you how to do it, and you try it out yourself. But the way it really work is that the teacher explains how to do something, five people ask questions he obviously just answered ("You pour the plaster into the water" "Do you put the plaster in the bucket first?" "No, you put the water in first" "When does the water go in?" "The water goes in first" and so on forever), then when everybody sits down to do the work, they can't remember half of it and they change things around without knowing what they're doing, then they wonder why it didn't come out right.

Some of art is skill, learned with time, but some of it is just paying attention when the teacher explains something. We had two weeks in ceramics to make plaster molds for the latest project. In that time I made three (actually four, but one was so messed up that I re-made it), and most of my classmates haven't finished their first mold yet. And they need to ask every few minutes how I did X, Y, or Z because they are rightly embarrassed about asking the teacher YET AGAIN.

So more training for poll workers is not going to help.

Posted by ayse on 03/09/04 at 9:44 AM