Voting in the OC

This week's primary election was my first Orange County election where I actually voted at the polls (despite my working at a polling place during last November's special election).

With this election, the Registrar of Voters made a modification to their electronic voting machines that overcame my last remaining objection to voting electronically. They added a voter-verified paper audit trail — as part of the last step in the process of casting my ballot, it printed (enshrined under glass) a paper receipt summarizing my ballot choices. Once I verified that the paper tally matched that shown on the screen and pressed "Cast Ballot", the receipt was whisked away into the voting machine's housing, a safe paper backup in the event of voting machine failure or electronic skullduggery by malicious hackers.

(OC's voting machines are made by Hart Intercivic, not Diebold, so that's one more big objection overcome right there.)

Election night returns were slow to come in, which the RoV partially blamed on a lack of volunteers. Given their 'lack of volunteers' shtick, I was a little surprised that nobody from the RoV called me about working in this election, despite the fact that I put my name back on their "call me" list — did one of the ladies that I worked with last time complain about my brash, youthful ways? Did I bring the wrong doughnuts? I got my precinct's ballots turned in on time ...

And so much for my future as an elections guru: Tom Umberg got walloped, and Tan Nguyen (he of the obnoxious signs) beat his challenger and will be moving on to face off against Loretta Sanchez in November's general election. Oh well. We may not have Tom, but we'll always have our "Tom Umberg: Orange County's Senator" potholder (one of two potholders that we got in the mail this year; the other potholder-sender, Jose Solorio, did much better).