Well, I just got to work at 8:15. Walked to the polls this morning just before 7am and there was already a line out the door. I've never had to wait in much of a line to vote before! This time took about 25 minutes. There were a few holdups... the woman in front of me found out that her name wasn't on their books even though she registered in time; their mistake, so they had to set her up with a provisional ballot. Then there was some sort of confusion with the voting machine that took a couple minutes to figure out.

Let me tell you about backwards Pennsylvania. They only had ONE voting machine at my precinct, and it looked like something out of a machine shop from World War II era. Your moms and dads can probably tell you about these things. For someone who is used to Ohio's punchcard system, it took a minute of just staring at the thing to figure out how it worked. My wife said she probably stared at it for a full minute and a half before asking a voting official for help on how to work the thing. It was all lever-driven. You pulled a big red lever and it closed a curtain behind you, and then there was an array of little levers all across the front of the thing, one lever for each candidate. You pulled down the lever above the candidate you wanted to vote for, and when you were done, you pulled the red lever back over and all the little levers snapped back up again. Then a lady stationed next to the machine pushed a little button in to reset it for the next person.

So I did my civic duty the "old-fashioned" way. I wonder how many other ways I can discover to vote before I die? So far I've used a scan-tron type ballot, filled in by pencil, or maybe it was pen (in Miami county, Ohio and Escambia county, Florida), the punchcard system (Montgomery county, Ohio) and now the Automated Voting Machine method which is apparently standard across the commonwealth of PA if my coworkers are to be believed.

Gri"Happy Election Day"shny