Vote.
I followed the instructions on my jurisdiction’s postcard, all but begging those of us who work at home/don’t work/have retired to pleeeeease vote off peak between 10 and 3. My better half (whose company gives a half day, paid, for voting) and I walked the mile from our house to the elementary school cafeteria where we vote, figuring the parking lot would be overwhelmed and for heaven’s sake it’s just a mile, we used to do five mile hikes for fun when we were dating and before we turned into elderly sloths.
We passed a guy just standing there with his McCain sign, eyes shifting around nervously, because he knew damn well he was supposed to be twenty feet further away where all the other signs were. We ran a gauntlet of signs instructing us to turn off our cameras, cell phones, recording devices, neural implants, and satellite connections to the mothership. Look, it was a very long list and my attention span for such things is very short.
The newspaper this morning was filled with “OMG Four HOUR LINEZ, RUN!!11!!” So imagine our surprise when we turned the corner and found… no line. We were the entire line at 10:30 AM, in a Baltimore suburb.
Admittedly, when we left, there was a line. Five people is a line! Sort of!
Anyway, if you’re thinking, hell, my vote doesn’t count so much that I want to wait four hours, go now! I’m thinking a lot of people are writing this one off, thinking their state is a shoo in for this guy or that guy. Yeah, and Dewey won the race, too. Go vote!
Yeah, I went in on last Thursday and voted, it was surprisingly painless.
about a 10 minute wait in line, 3 minutes to get processed by the attendants and another 5 minutes to vote.
all in all I’ve waited longer to get my food at a restraunt.
Much better then the last election I participated in
Also, if you’re still on the east coast I think your blog is showing the wrong time.
I’m running Central Standard and it’s 12:30pm here, yet on my post it’s showing 6:30pm
Unless you’re in europe now or something?
Lucky you. We got there at about 8:45 am, and walked out of the polling place sometime after 11:00. Not enough coffee in me to put up with a 90-minute line just to check in to vote.
Ugh…I got to the polls at 6:45AM and still had to park 3 blocks away. I walked in the rain to the school and up to the line (outside the building and snaking around under the canopy) and waited, thinking that surely this would be an hour, hour and a half tops which would be about double the time national elections usually take at this place.
Little did I know that the line went through the ENTIRE school and back around to the doors. By the time I found out this tidbit, it was pretty much at that “Well, you’ve come this far…” point. Adding to the annoyance was that if there were 800 people in line during this time, 600 of them shared the same chunk of the alphabet as me.
Long story short, I walked three block in the pre-dawn hours in the rain and cold to stand in line for 3 hours to vote. I’m also sure that despite living on the coast it was uphill in both directions, and wild Indians attacked you as you made the trek.
At least that’s the story I’ll tell my grandkids about how we used to vote for our Presidents, rather than ritual combat to the death with sporks…
It took me longer to drive to my polling place than it did to do the deed. 1 person in line ahead of me at 4:00pm, 4 others filling in the little arrows on their ballots beyond that.
And I got a 4oz cup of lukewarm apple cider when I was done! My tax dollars at work. ;-D
I had to drive 20 minutes to vote — never bothered to change my registration info after I moved — but there was no line and lots of empty voting booths. Overall, one of the most pleasant voting experiences I’ve had.
I actually voted Friday at my town clerk’s office. In most of(all?) of Massachusetts you can get an absentee ballot on the spot if you’ll be out of town on the day of the election. Yea, work will let you take time before or after your shift to vote, but best to get it out of the way.
Driving to work yesterday, I saw lines that went outside of large VFW halls, onto the street, around the corner, down the street, and around another corner. Last night was a good night, that is for sure.