Election Day

Lest you forget, today is election day. I just got back from Performing My Civic Duty, which for the first time in my 9 years of voter eligibility, was performed on a punch card ballot. I can see why people want to eliminate them. I am a young, able-bodied, reasonably mentally capable and more or less ept person, and I was concerned that I might not be doing it right. Did I have the ballot seated properly in the slot? Was the booklet lined up right above the ballot? Was the stylus poking all the way through? Did I make sure I poked in the hole I meant to? How do I know the counters are really going to count Hole 37 as a "No" vote? Why are there 8 holes in my ballot if I only voted on five issues? If that sort of paranoia was going through my head, I can just imagine the problems that folks with unsteady hands and no cheat sheet might have. I was so concerned about getting the mechanics of voting by punch card right, I probably wouldn't have remembered how I planned to vote if I didn't write it down ahead of time. As it was, it took a few minutes of examining my ballot after I pulled it out to realize that the three extra holes most likely calibrated the counting machine.

Actually, I only did half my civic duty. I voted on the issues--one economic stimulus measure and four measures trying to fix the snafus from last election day--but I skipped over all the local government official elections, since try as I might, I couldn't find out enough about any of the candidates to say yea or nay on a single one of them. I'm not sure what my county elections board does to inform voters, but I'm pretty much left relying on whatever campaign literature gets left on my doorknob. Considering I live 5 miles out of town on a road with probably 10 registered voters per mile, we don't get a lot of canvassing. Living in Oregon spoiled me, what with the Board of Election's efforts to make sure all registered voters had a reasonable chance to find out all the names of people running for office and some cursory biographical information.

On a peripherally related note, I'm used to running the gamut of campaign workers outside polling places. This was the first year I also had to avoid the school's bake sale.