Voting

I got up at 5:17 this morning to vote; only voting or a plane flight would get me up at that ungodly hour, and by 6 am I was sitting in the truck to the accompaniment of the Ting Tings, trying to find my voter card. It's a new district for me, and I wanted to be sure I had all my ID matching (I had already looked up my voter registration on line, so I was in the system--I had registered to vote in the summer at the Driver Services Office). The polling place was a church, which I thought was odd (it's always been a public building in where I have voted before; a community center or a school). And there was a huge line, but it moved fast--because OMG there were paper ballots!! The local tabulations here are done by the old fill-in-the bubble, opti-scan system that leaves a paper trail. In New Jersey we went from lever machines, which were like playing slot machines and a lot of fun, to punchcards that were fiddly, to the despised "no record" touch screens by Sequoia. So it was a delight to see the opti-scan sheets. The ballot itself was remarkably short--I'm used to a long set of complicated budgetary propositions (in New Jersey the schools plead with you to go vote, because the budgets have to be approved, as well as earmarks for wetlands and road improvements and all kinds of housekeeping, which I liked being able to vote on.) Here there was very little, and it included a list of no-contender county offices, which made the ballot look rather Soviet-style in it's "you get to vote for one" section. I can't believe they couldn't find a single other person to hold these offices! So now the waiting begins.

*The photo above is from Sept 19th's Talk Like A Pirate day, and I don't have the attribution as I stole it off teh Internets.