Evidence of a vote NOT being counted by a machine in California, as it happened!

[KK9]

23. I can't tell what's going on...

...in that video, since it's upside down much of the time.

I've worked the polls here in my Massachusetts town. We vote on paper ballots that are put into a Diebold Accu Vote scanning machine. Before the polls open, an election officer opens the machine, makes sure there are no ballots in it, then locks it.

Voters mark their paper ballots with a black marker, then put it in the machine. The machine will reject it if there are no marks, stray marks, an "overvote" (say voting for two candidates in a race where you can only select one) and sometimes for non-obvious reasons. If the ballot is rejected, the voter can try putting it in again or in a different way. If it is still rejected, a poll worker will go over the ballot with them (away from everyone else) to try to determine the issue. If the voter made a mistake, or even if there is no obvious reason, they can either mark their ballot "SPOILED" and get another one, or they can go ahead and cast the rejected ballot. In the case of the latter, an election officer will use a key to open a special auxilliary drawer on the machine and place the ballot in there, then relock.

I always closed the polls, at 8pm, when the polls closed, I'd be given a stack of ballots from one or more auxilliary drawers. Working with a partner, to check each other's work, I'd try my best to determine what the voters intent was and hand count that ballot. If a mark was too faint to machine register, made near, but not exactly on the right place, or they didn't make the correct mark (a dark line) but wrote something like "yes", I'd count that vote, as their intent was clear (to a human if not a machine). If they overvoted, say checked Clinton AND Sanders, neither vote counted. If their intent wasn't clear on one race, but was on the others, I'd hand tally the clear ones. Sometimes votes wrote commentary or drew pictures on ballots that were otherwise clear, requiring hand counting. Sometimes, not often, I'd have a ballot that seemed to have no problems and the machine should have read, but since it didn't, I'd count that by hand.

The machines counted the votes that were machine readable. Workers hand counted the others. Every ballot had to be accounted for, so that the number of people who checked in and took a ballot = number of ballots counted by machine + number of ballots counted by hand. The warden supervised that. Everyone's work was observed by another election worker and a police officer.

The ballots from the machines and the hand count tallies were sealed in separate boxes at the end of the night and sent to the Town Clerk's office. She releases "unofficial" election results, often that night or early the next morning, then "official" election results some days later, after she and her staff had reviewed everything (I'm not sure what that process entails).

If that California incident happened here (I get the impression the guy was having trouble getting his vote counted by the machine?), he could have kept trying, which I take it he did, or he could have handed it to a poll worker to put in the hand count drawer.

I've always been pretty confident voting in this system. Especially after working in it.