cellio | barely a line

My voting place is a school gym that hosts four precincts. This morning the line for one of them (14/25, I think, for you locals) was about 50 people long, while the others were only 2-3 people long. Fortunately for me, I'm in 14/23, and there was one person ahead of me at the table. Time of arrival at the building (not the gym): 8:35. Time out, including a stop at the bake sale (the school kids actually went to the trouble to have kosher goods, so I rewarded that): 8:48. I hadn't seen in advance the text of the one ballot question, so that might have accounted for as much as one minute of my time there. All in all, this was much smoother than I expected, and I was at work by 9:05. (I think it took me longer to vote in the mid-terms two years ago.)

I saw no campaigners or pollsters at all, by the way -- pretty unusual.

If I correctly interpreted things, I was voter #82 in my precinct. I understand turnout is supposed to be high today, but you can't tell that from my precinct.

I have never had, or even seen ("in the flesh"), an "I voted" sticker. We get paper stubs -- "receipts" in the sense of showing we were there, but there is no paper trail for actual votes.

I had received some private offers from "non-swing" states of vote trades, but in the end I decided that my vote for Bob Barr in PA is more important than that vote would be in some other state. In PA it affects our ballot access, among things; in another state it's just a statistic -- so in my eyes my vote here is worth many times what it would be worth in a trade scenario. I didn't feel it would be ethical (and perhaps not legal) to ask for an exchange rate other than 1:1.

barely a line

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