Hot Election News: The online ballot marking option

The short direct version.

February 9 is a special election with measures on the ballot in many parts of King County. (And probably elsewhere in the state but RantWoman has not looked at the Secretary of State page http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/ yet.

The really important cool point: This week RantWoman discovered something called the online ballot marking program

http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/how-to-vote/ballots/accessible-voting-options.aspx

RantWoman definitely encourages readers to check  it out and is definitely interested in people's experiences. But it is perfectly fine if readers share their experiences directly with the people getting paid to conduct elections and bypass RantWoman.

The longer version:
RantWoman, have they sent out Voters' Guides yet?

The Chief Morale Officer apparently had not opened her ballot envelope; the voter's guide is short and comes with the ballot.

RantWoman have you voted?

RantMom and RantWoman will do Sunday supper regardless but RantMom pointed out that the February 9 special election is ballot is very simple and around the RantWomen completely uncontroversial and not in need of say fortifications from the Stranger Election Control Board.

February 9 is a special election with measures on the ballot in many parts of King County. (And probably elsewhere in the state but RantWoman has not looked at the Secretary of State page http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/ yet.

The really important cool point: This week RantWoman discovered something called the online ballot marking program

http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/how-to-vote/ballots/accessible-voting-options.aspx

It mattered to use the exact phrase above; RantWoman would not have found this
if she had not used some of her precious moments of functional eyeball time to scrape her eyes across her actual King County Elections mailer, notice the phrase "online ballot marking" and looked for a link.

There was no link. There was a QR code, one of those black and white rectangle things that is supposed to connect one's mobile device magically with information. RantWoman probably needs some QR codes for dummies instruction, but photographing the QR code did not get anywhere either.

RantWoman has been around search engines enough to know that a good search string can make the difference between a whole lot of screen reader chatter and a direct route to what she needs.

The helpful search string:
online ballot marking king county

Thank you search engine. RantWoman would not have found the right page if she had to wade through all the layers of directory from the webpage.

Furthermore, RantWoman lives in an exotic fantasy world where just maybe around elections time, the link to the elections page makes it to the kingcounty.gov homepage. Ahh, but there will be more elections this year to try that!

RantWoman thanks her search engine for serving up the same query when RantWoman checked out behavior on her Android phone. Dang. Another site reminding RantWoman that she needs to track down a problem she either has whined or means to whine about separately. RantWoman is unclear whether the problem is with the sites or with her phone. Sigh.

There are options for sharing on Facebook and Twitter and there is
also a link for the Disability Advisory  Committee who RantWoman hopes will note  additional comments:

In December, RantWoman and several other people from the WA Councild of the Blind, the Deaf-Blind Service Center and the Lighthouse for the blind testified at the Health, Housing and Human Services Committee of the King County Council. http://kingcounty.gov/council/committees/health_housing_human.aspx

 Several questions about elections accessibility came up. RantWoman's councilmember was all over the issue. The hearing was December 1; information about the online b allot marking was posted to the website on December 15. RantWoman is not sure whether it is reasonable to expect members of the King County Council to be aware of something coming down the pike, but would have found it helpful to hear in advance if the councilmembers knew.

RantWoman knows many blind people who think very fondly of the Help America Vote Act, the legislation which ensured that there would be accessible voting units, basically ways for blind and low-vision people to vote independently at ordinary polling places just like other voters. King County purchased a large number of these units and used them for just a couple elections before all of WA went to all-mail voting.

Now Accessible Voting Units are available in 3 locations in King County which is a very large county. At the December hearing suggestions came up about interest in increasing the number of places one can go to vote using Accessible Voting Units and about some other questions related to this. Again, RantWoman is very interested in readers' views and rantWoman also notes that this is a Presidential election year. So now would be a good time to think ahead for the primary in August and the November election. Just sayin' though for now just check out the online ballot marking options for the February 9 election!