My voting adventure

When I got my sample ballot in the mail, I noticed I had a new polling place, a fire station a few blocks away. I was a bit concerned about the location because I knew there was a lot of roadwork going on in the area and parts of that street were blocked off.

Yesterday morning, I'm off to vote. Traffic is heavy in the morning so I took a slightly longer route to the polling place. Just as I feared, the street was blocked to southbound traffic so I drove several blocks around the subdivision to enter from the opposite side. Unfortunately, the street was blocked on that side also. So I went home to call the Registrar of Voters to make sure my polling place hadn't changed. No it hadn't and they gave me an alternate route to the fire station.

So off I go again. This time, I had no trouble getting there, but had to park a block away from the fire station (no biggie). There was a line of people (the polling place was in their huge garage) so I had to wait a bit (not unexpected, and again no biggie). Then a poll worker announced, "We're having technical difficulties." Great, just great. Only one out of the eight or so electronic polling booths work. No wonder there's a line. Somehow, we find out paper ballots are available, but she can't offer them to us; we have to ask for them (must be some legal restriction about offering alternative voting forms). I decided not to wait for the electronic poll and ask for a paper ballot. So I had to go through the verification again because they had to figure out which ballot to give me.

After I finished voting, I leaned over to place my ballot in the ballot box on the floor. When I stood up, I hit my head on some tubing that ran from the floor to the ceiling. The poor poll workers were besides themselves with worry. I wasn't hurt at all; the tubing wasn't hard and I really just tapped my head. I sure was glad to get my "I voted" sticker; I think I earned it this year.