Contra Costa County has decided that secret ballots are relics of a bygone era.

I vote at St. John Vianney Church, 1650 Ygnacio Valley Road in Walnut Creek, Ca. After I had filled out a six-page “fill-in the bubbles” ballot, I stood in line to feed the pages into the electronic maw of the voting machine.  Except this, the only voting machine for three precincts, which had been switched on at 7:00 a.m. (I observed the poll workers switching it on) was still in warm-up mode 7:16 a.m.

So the poll worker pointed to a second/rear slot on the back of the voting machine, where I was to simultaneously drop all my ballot pages, and was told they would be counted later. Okay... so I dropped my ballots in the second /rear slot of the machine.

I did asked the poll worker if there were two separate sealed ballot boxes inside the machine, one with “machine read” ballots and one with “unread” ballots, like mine, and was firmly told that there was such a setup.

Fine. They wouldn’t lie about that, would they?

Then the machine finally beeped a couple of times, and the already long line of voters, holding their completed ballots, began to feed their pages, one by one into the front slot. Except that a poll worker stood right next to each voter as the ballots were fed into the machine. My wife, who was still in line, was shocked that the poll worker could see every vote on the ballot as each page was fed into the machine. And this poll worker never moved. 

I was told by the poll workers that I could not photograph inside the polling station, or this blog would have some photos, and I really did not wish to make a scene. And I was assured, like some silly child, that the hovering poll worker was not looking at the votes, just assisting in feed the machine.

Yeah, sure.

I called the Contra Costa County Clerk, Elections Division, when we got back home.  They politely took a message and said they would look into this “situation” later in the day, as they were busy dealing with balky voting machines around the county.

What was your voting experience today?