Yesterday was Super Tuesday, the day of presidential primaries in 15 states and American Samoa. As the late House Speaker Tip O’Neil liked to say, “all politics is local.” In our little town of less than 1000 full-time residents, election voting is held in the Town Office conference room, which you see here:
We have four cardboard “voting booths” for filling out paper ballots while comfortably sitting down. There is no more hand-counting of those ballots. There’s a sealed and computerized ballot box to do that. It’s that dark gray container with a computer screen on its top, behind the good-looking voter in the image (who just happens to be my wife, Barbara).
You slip the end of your filled-out ballot into the gray ballot box and it grabs and swallows the submission with a slurp. It checks the ballot for errors, counts and tabulates it with the other votes, and stores it securely inside, just in case it might be needed for a recount. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 5, 2024.)