improvising, and getting it wrong...

So I went to vote in my city's mayoral primary today.  Whee. 

We use these scantron-type ballots, so usually you check out with the election volunteer, put the ballot in the machine, and all's well.  Of course, today our particular machine had lost power, or something; in any event, it wasn't working.

Apparently (according to a remote coworker who volunteers as a poll worker & who has developed cryptographically verifiable voting systems professionally), they're *supposed* to have a separate (backup) ballot box to cover cases like this.

Instead, we left our ballots face-down in a pile on the table, and a nice city policeman was standing by (5 feet away), watching the ballots until the machine could be made to work. At which point, in theory, the poll worker would feed them in. 

Oy.  At least it wasn't an *important* election.