Vote!

This is a reminder to the nine people who read this thing to go do their civic duty today and go vote. There’s no excuse. You can always get time off work to do it and if you can’t, you should go get a different job while you’re at it. I went and voted at the elementary school on East Dunstable Road today, and here’s how it went.

There’s apparently no law about campaigning outside the polling place, as there were people holding signs up to within several yards of the door. The parking lot was pretty full, but there was no line going outside. This was encouraging compared to the last election I participated in. Inside, there was no line either. I walked right up to the table, told the man sitting there my name, and he checked a box next to it. He did not ask me for identification. He then handed me a large card with Constitutional questions on one side and candidates for office on another and directed me to any of the nearby booths.

The card itself is essentially a scantron. You fill in the oval next to who you are voting for with a thick felt-like black pen. I voted on the two rather boring Constitutional questions quickly, then flipped over to examine the candidates. True to my vow, I voted against all incumbents on the Federal level. I don’t think they have performed their jobs well at all, and in regular life when people don’t perform at their jobs you fire them. So consider this my vote that they should be fired. The hardest part of the ballot was figuring out which candidates for state House of Representatives to vote for. There were twenty names, and you could select a maximum of ten. In the end, I only voted for seven. I knew there were people I did not want to vote for and people I certainly did, but it just didn’t add up to ten. There were a couple other offices to vote for that I was completely unprepared for.

After finishing filling in the ballot, I carried it over to the counting machine. The machine is literally a black box - about four feet high, three feet wide, and four feet deep. I fed the ballot into the top and it self-fed in as it was scanned. The entire process took about five minutes from getting in the door to leaving. I feel good about how I voted - no regrets about the candidates or issues. Now it’s just a matter of time to see if the rest of the country feels the way I do about my elected officials.