Did my duty

I voted today. One advantage of sitting at home all week is that we get to avoid rush hours where possible. On a Thursday afternoon there was no line at all for advance voting.

We had to fill out a form with our name and address, which felt retro. In the touch screen version in our precinct there were 15 full screens to choose from. Except for the Presidential candidates and the Senator and a couple of other high profile offices, I unfortunately didn’t know anything about any of those sundry office or the candidates.

Before heading out to vote, I spent a good bit of time reading up on the candidates and looking at newspaper endorsements. I wrote those down in a small notebook and took that with me.
There was also a mind-numbing list of 70 judges that we had to decide whether they get to stay in office or go. This doesn’t make any sense to me. Since lay people don’t follow the judicial processes, why ask them to vote on this? Lawyers and others involved are much better-suited for the task. I looked at the recommendations of the different bar associations and voted based on that. (But an overwhelming majority of my ballot was No Vote. I simply didn’t know enough to make a choice.)

My final ballot printout was 3 pages long. I wish we didn’t have to waste so much paper but I guess the redundancy is needed. The whole voting process (once I was assigned a machine) took close to 10 minutes. Much longer than I anticipated.

Overall, I enjoyed this freedom to cast my ballot at my convenience. Advance voting is definitely the way of the future. I wonder if we can vote from our home PC’s in 2012.

Now I am ready to sit back and watch the results come in on Nov. 4th.