I headed to my local polling place this morning at about 8am, which this election was in our neighborhood firestation. I have to confess, I had quite feeling of deja vu this morning, having again experienced and seen many of the same things that I’ve seen in the hundreds of polling places I’ve visited in my time associated with the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (since the 2000 presidential election).

First, good and bad news. The good news is that my polling place was busy this morning; the bad news was that meant that parking wasn’t straightforward (I had to circle the block to find street parking, a typical problem regarding polling places in densely-populated urban areas). I also had to wait a bit, it took me about 3-4 minutes to check in an to then get my ballot, and then I had to wait for just over 5 minutes to be able to use a ballot booth with an Inkavote device (I’m an LA County voter). Part of my wait time, of course, arose because one voter cut in front of the folks waiting in line (which generated some irritation).

But based on what I saw this morning, I’m betting that turnout in today’s California primary election will be higher than seen in recent statewide primary elections.

Second, there was again the same confusion we’ve seen in polling places in previous elections regarding the rules of the top-two primary, which admittedly are complex. Some non-party-preference voters don’t understand that they can request the party ballot for only some parties, and at least one person who seemed to be a registered Green party voter was vocal in their irritation at not being able to vote for Sanders. There was also confusion in the minds of some voters about which ballot booths to use, because they needed to use a specific vote recorder (and thus a specific party booth) in this election.

Third, one of the two Inkavote ballot scanners seemed to be having some problems; when I arrived, there was some sort of commotion regarding one of the two ballot scanners, with three poll workers trying to figure out why a voter was having some sort of problem scanning their ballot. Whether that was resolved or not was hard for me to tell, as it wasn’t the scanner associated with my voting precinct.

Fourth, as I had written about earlier, the ballot for the U.S. Senate race was confusing. The ballot had a warning page about the ballot design, and while I think that it was about as well laid out as possible for the InkaVote system, it was confusing. I’m hypothesizing that once the election is over and we have data to study, we are likely to see a higher-than-expected residual vote (caused by overvoting) with respect to this race.

So a mixed evaluation. Clearly, since 2000 academics and election officials have learned a lot about how to study and conduct elections. But it’s also somewhat frustrating to see the same issues cropping up again, with not terribly accessible polling locations, lines, voter confusion about the rules of the election, potential problems with ballot designs, and seemingly glitchy voting technologies. In general, it all seemed a bit more chaotic than necessary. Hopefully between now and November many of these issues will be mitigated or eliminated, as it’s looking like a contested and controversial general election is heading our way.