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I Voted Today
Yesterday on NPR, I was listening to stories of people who live in 30 states that aren't Pennsylvania, talking about voting early. From the sound of things, people were waiting one, two, three, even six hours to cast their votes. It seems like in an effort to avoid the lines today, people... stood in lines on other days. Some people were doing it essentially as an absentee ballot that they didn't have to mail in, but I gather that some of them were really worried about lines. The problem is that in many of these places, the one polling station that was open took the place of hundreds that are open today.
The longest I've ever waited to cast a vote was last year in the primaries, when I waited about 10 minutes to discover that I was at the wrong polling place. At the correct polling place, I walked right in to vote.
Today, Lauren and I decided to go vote during a shared free period after lunch, giving us up to an hour to get our votes cast here in the battleground that is Pennsylvania. We needn't have hurried: we, the 288th and 289th voters at our polling place were in and out in less than 10 minutes, including the time it took for the poll workers to sort out why one man's vote wouldn't go through on the electronic machine (he hadn't voted either way on the lone State Referendum, the divisive Water and Sewer Improvement Bond.
I can't imagine how early voting in Pennsylvania could have improved the situation. At least this once, it's good to live out in the middle of nowhere.
The major disappointment of the dayso far has been that we didn't get the "I voted today" stickers that we always used to get. The women running the polls looked at us like they hadn't given those antiques out in years, but just four years ago--at the exact same polling place--I received one. They were, however, willing to give me a note to show off, confirming that I had, in fact, voted today. Who knows though: with the electronic voting machines, maybe I didn't vote today!
In any case, the only thing to do now is sit back and wait to see how it all shakes out. Well, that and go about my regular business--since the United States hasn't yet made Election Day a national holiday, I've got work to do.