Voting day

I woke up with a start at 6:30 this morning, without the aid of my two-legged two-year-old alarm clock. Because I realized with a flash there was something very, very important I forgot to do today and I had to make sure I did it. You know I’ve been obsessing about this, right?

At 6:30 am I realized I’d forgotten to turn in my Latin homework. (Yes, I’m trying to do the Latin again.)

After I sent my homework off, I moved like a busy bee getting everything ready: lunches, breakfasts, suites of kids’ clothes. Got everyone fed, got everyone dressed. Darin came with to drop the kids off at school, and then we went to go vote.

We spent a long time last night going over the California ballot, which was just crammed chock-full of races and propositions and initiatives. My friend Pooks in Texas told me her ballot had exactly one question on it and I snarled. Darin and I pulled up SmartVoter’s site, and the San Jose Mercury, and the San Jose Metro (the alternative paper) to see what they had to say. The only one worth looking at was SmartVoter, a site I highly recommend. It has everyone’s ballot, the statements for and against propositions, and candidate statements.

Hey Pooks: Because of SmartVoter, I even managed to figure out who to vote for for the school board. Yay, me.

There was a line at the voting place—maybe 10 to 12 people ahead of us when we got there. Considering the previous times we’ve voted at this precinct and had no one else there, this was quite a lot of people. The holdup was the electronic cards for the Sequoia touchscreen machines: the precinct only had a few of them, so everyone who had checked in had to wait for one of the cards to become available. There were 5 voting booths (up from the normal 2 or 3) but the line moved very slowly because most of the voters were elderly and having a terrible time reading the screen.

Worst problem I saw: One old woman had managed to enter the polling place through a second door (which was supposed to be locked to keep just this very thing from happening) and stood in the wrong line for an hour, which made her upset. She ended up signing in behind another woman who was extremely upset that this old woman was trying to vote before her. The poll workers were having none of Ms. Snippy and gave the old woman (who had many people vouching for her presence for the past hour) a card.

Unfortunately, the touchscreen ballot did not give the races in the same order as they appeared in the ballot (so there was much flipping of sample ballot pages), and it crammed so many things on per screen that I had to double-check everything I did. At the end it gave me a summary of how I voted; whether the machine actually records them that way (ha, ha) I don’t know.

I got my big “I voted Touchscreen!” sticker and slapped it on immediately.

However, my tension level hasn’t gone down any. Yes, I’ve voted (woot!), but I have to wait an extremely long time to start hearing about exit polls and results. Dammit, I’m trying to grow my nails, not bite them to the quick again.