I voted!
 

How did you vote in the presidential election?

early and often.

I pressed the button next to the name I wanted, and the light next to it lit up. Then I pressed the "register vote" button, and the thing beeped.

It's supposed to be a poll but I screwed up.

See the other thread.

Oh, we're old school out here in the wild west.

We have paper ballots and black felt pens. Next to each name is an arrow that looks broken in the middle. You have to draw the line to make your arrow whole to indicate your vote for that candidate. No chads, no software conspiracy theories.

Some kind of touch screen machine. I brought my kids into the booth with me and let them watch. I explained what I was doing each step of the way.

I can see it now.

OK kids, when I push this button I will hopefully help elect the next president. Let's all stop for a moment of silence and pray he doesn't fuck up America any worse than the other guy would have. Ramen.

We also had the broken arrow sheets. I've heard it's a slam against native americans.

eh, give them some firewater and they'll be fine.

dar, since you started the thread, you can still ad a poll to it. look for 'thread tools' on the right side of one of the title bars. there should be an option for adding a poll.

Apparently, I could have requested the broken arrow sheet, but didn't know that until it was too late. I could have gone for some firewater.

Thanks, lj. I found it after I started a new thread.

Well now I know how to do a poll.

How did I vote?:) As the wife, X-Lydia, is fond of putting it, "Why, by secret ballot, in accordance with the law."

For McCain, as I said I would -- now that alea jacta est.

Paper ballot, and only a five minute wait in line

I much prefer paper ballots. For me there is an emotional connection to the act of putting my 'X' next to the candidate's name.

We have the paper ballots and black felt pens, but fill in an oval next to each candidates name. Then we feed the ballot into a machine that accepts or rejects the ballot.

In fact, the guy in front of me was walking away from said machine when his ballot was rejected and got spit back out. (I resisted peeking at it) It noticed something on it, and when a volunteer came over, the guy said he had made a mistake and crossed one circle out and filled in the other circle. He had to fill out a completely new ballot.

Yup -- a "spoiled ballot," as it's called in the trade. He should have turned it in to the poll officials and gotten a new one right off the bat.

Yes; quite so. The electronic voting machines we're nowadays seeing are more properly on-site vote tabulators. They optically scan the marked ballots, derive their data, and store these paper ballots in a bin beneath the electronic apparatus. Their big advantage seems to be that when all these polling place tabulators dump their data into the big 'puter located at the county Elections Division, the vote counting is very fast and accurate and Elections Division workers don't have to stay up until four-thirty processing. And there's still the physical paper ballots there if needed for a recount.

Mine was like Labrat's. But I had a 45 minute wait in line because the whole thing was run by coffin dodgers.

Mine was like Labrat's, too. There were old folks at my polling place, also, but they were quite efficient - no waiting, I made my satisfying black marks, fed the ballot into the machine, and was out of there in 20 minutes.

I filled in narrow ovals with a soft pencil. I only hope that coloring outside the lines a bit won't affect the results, but the pencil was soft and thick and the table top was pebbly. The machine did not reject the form so it probably worked.

We had paper forms. There was a pen and a pencil (one of those soft lead kind) but I didn't see the pencil until I had already used the pen. Then we just dumped our ballots out of the plastic holder thingy into a box.

After I voted, I realized that earlier when I had offered to help a woman carry some bulky and unweilding bags and packages (she was on her way out when I was going in) that what she was struggling with was a ballot box.

WTF? How safe is that? I presume they all need to be rechecked for authenticity anyway...but now I wonder if I should have just waited and voted today.

What if the pen didn't work well enough? What if Billy Ballot Box walked off with a hundred people's ballots.

Now I'm getting paranoid.

Washingtonpost.com headline is reporting: "Following midday lull, long waits expected for after-work crowd. Officials to accommodate those in line by closing."

It's nice that the officials are willing to accommodate those in line by closing and turning them away.

I had no wait at all at 12:30, and the evangelical xtians even had a spread of coffee, bagels, candy etc set out. I let Ripley make my decision on the ref. vote.

Bagels wouldn't buy my vote, but my goodness I'd be happy to pretend for free food!

I voted the last day in the last hour for early voting, with a 30 min wait. I used a touch screen which is the only way I have ever voted.

Not a vote buy, basic hospitality. Many polling places do that same.

Sorry - cultural difference. No-one here puts food out.
Good for them - I approve that aspect of Christianity, it jibes with what I was brought up with.

We had the old turquoise blue metal lever machines. KA Chunk. clsoe the curtain, flip little levers, squint, wonder why the little levers don't move, try to determine why one lever is really far away from a name and another is really close, make your best guess. Ka Chunk. votes cast, curtain opens.

Ever since I changed my registration to Republican I have no longer been plagued by the same problems as Tim Robbins.

In L.A. we use the Inkavote system. You insert your scantron ballot card in the slot below the election booklet, you open the booklet see the candidates or issues with holes next to them. You get a little pen thing and poke it into the correct hole and it marks the scantron ballot card. When you turn the page, the dots are further to the right, and you continue the process.

When you're done, you hand the ballot card to the old guy running the scantron machine, he tears off the top and hands it to you, and then you insert it into the machine to be counted. Then he stickes an "I Voted" sticker to your shirt or hands it to you if you're a lady, and you go on your way knowing you did your civic duty.

I can't watch! it's too nerve-wracking!

*is exhausted with the tension*

That sticker will (or would have) got you a free cone at Ben&Jerry's.

Apparently, Krispy Kreme and Starbucks were offering free goodies with the sticker as well, along with the car wash down the street from my shop.

paper ballot, black pen, ballot #0007

What was your voting location, Zack's Feed and Bait Shop?

Feed, Bait, and LATTES. It's the twenty-first century. :p

Can you get a carpuccino there as well? :)

I had a few minutes' wait in the A-G line. The other letters of the alphabet had no lines.

Close, :) The township garage. btw Pete was #0001. Our ballot receipts will make pretty cool momentos.

It's interesting how folks IRL are a little funny about asking straight up who we voted for. A woman from Trinidad that I work with finally just asked. It was worth the election cycle just to see her joyful smile.

I voted and didn't actually research what Michigan had as proposals on (I figured I would just wing it) and when I read it...wholly shit, legalizing med. pot and stem cell research....pretty serious stuff...and...they passed (hurrah! - in my opinion)! Then, on cnn I looked up other states proposals and wow, there are some crazy things States try to pass.

Yep Calif outlawed Gay marriage. Of all the states to put it in their constitution. Calif would have been the last state I would have suspected.

The effort by the Prop 8 crowd against gay marriage wanted to make it harder to remove from the law of the land by writing it into the State Constitution, rather than as a state law that got overturned some while back.

But constitutional amendments can be repealed, too. And whether this is actually going to get in is already under contention in three different lawsuits, one testing the legality of a State Constitutional Amendment not crafted by the State Legislature. This is going to simmer for some time yet.

But Happy Monkey begins with an "H" and Monkey begins with an "M"?

I'm a Capuchin...