Should I Feel Disenfranchised?

The type of voting ballot being used in San Francisco requires a person to fill in a broken arrow to a candidate of choice. At the polling place that I was at, a felt-tip pen was provided inside each voting stall. As most people might be aware, anything that is written with a felt-tip pen can be easily smudged, which is exactly what happened to a few of the markings I made on my ballot. When I asked the kid (he looked college-aged) who was running the ballot reading machine if this was a problem, he said "no." I remain skeptical.

Also, the voting for San Francisco Supervisors employed something called "ranked choice voting," which basically asks people to selct their first, second and third choices for a particular District Supervisor seat. The claimed purpose of this crazy voting method is to avoid prolonged and costly runoffs in case there is either a tie among two candidates or no candidate is able to garner more than 50% of the vote (I can't remember which one it is). Since there was only one supervisorial candidate in my district who I could vote for in good conscience, I didn't make a second and third choice. This seems to have been the reason for why the ballot reading machine didn't initially scan my ballot. After asking me if I had failed to fill in a couple of things on the Supervisor ballot, the kid running the ballot reading machine punched in a couple of buttons, and voila, my ballot got scanned. At least I think it did. Now I'm kicking myself for not asking.

Update: I noticed this guy's name among the candidates running for San Francisco School Board, and I just thought to myself, "This city is loony bin."