Trickster

Mercury Retrograde – Election Style

Mercury went retrograde (Rx) on Halloween this year.

Quite honestly, I’ve been feeling that the usual experience of breakdowns in electronics or snafus in communication were seemingly giving me a wide berth, for which I was quite grateful. Indeed, I’ve actually been feeling surprised, grateful, and delighted over some communication experiences lately.

Over the past year, I’ve actually written a smattering of posts that at least tangentially discussed or touched upon Mercury Rx and possible instances in which I may have been experiencing ‘fallout’ from that celestial occurrence.

Today, though, was a perfect example of Mercury Rx creating some potential havoc.

Election Day SNAFU

At our polling place, we have machines that are more modern than the old machines that looked like they’d come out of Army barracks and would register one’s vote in a dramatic, mechanical WHOOSH (complete with opening the curtain at the same time as lodging the vote). But being ‘more modern’ than those olive green steel monstrosities isn’t saying much.

The machines we’ve had for probably a good 15-20 years (probably more – I’m guessing), are electronic in the sense that they have blinking lights a la an archaic Lost in Space episode. They log votes on a roll of paper resembling old adding machine tapes located in each machine, and they’re also ‘backed up’ on an electronic ‘tape.’

Today’s Mercury Rx Moment

For the first time in our Judge of Election’s experience (and she’s been at this for over thirty years) (I’ve participated as an official in one capacity or another for probably at least 20 or so), we had a major issue confront us at the close of the polls.

One of the machines printed out the results for us to tally…and the ‘register tape’ upon which we rely was BLANK. It apparently hadn’t registered any votes.

We were horrified.

Yes, this is precisely the type of thing that is often attributed to “Mercury Retrograde.”

I’m running out of time to post this, but suffice it to say, we delivered all of the tapes and forms and tabulations concerning the other machine to the Board of Elections, and advised them of the extremely stressful situation of one of our machines.

Luckily, they popped the tape backup into a machine they had at the courthouse and out rolled our printout of all the votes cast on our second machine.

All’s Well That…

Yes. I’ll take it. We were able to quickly tally the numbers from the second machine and add them to the tallies from the first machine. So all in all, it ended up that this was not nearly the crisis it could have been.

But wow – what a stress and a scare.

I, for one, am eager to see the new machines our county officials will be selecting in the near future.

It’s time. The Time of the Dinosaur Voting Machines is over. And I’m just grateful this crisis had a completely benign resolution, because VOTING MATTERS!

(T-752)