My Voting Experience

I've been quiescent for a few days, but that quiescence doesn't mean inactive. It's been a busy few days. It's time for my fall pilgrimage to Mexico so a lot of time was spent getting ready to be out of Indiana for about 4 weeks. Somehow, as busy as I was, I still ended up leaving some things I need in Mexico back in Indiana.

Part of my time was spent voting. I had decided to early vote, despite my objection to the use of it, in order to save myself a little time. So Monday I drove to our polling place and was pleased to find few cars in the parking lot. Thinking this won't take very long I walked up to the entrance door to find a sign saying there was no early voting that day. No early voting for me on Monday.

Tuesday I got up and decided to vote late morning behind the crowd voting before work but ahead of the crowd that would vote at lunch. I arrived back at the polling place entering the door at 10:45 entering into what looked like a mob. Asking around I found the end of the line and after 30 minutes had finally made my way back to being part of the mob greeting people as they entered the door. Part of the problem was the turnout but also there were issues with the system verifying registration that slowed and sometimes stopped progress.

It was hard initially to understand the flow of the line waiting to vote but it eventually became clear. After getting away from the entrance the line formed down a hallway, which I felt was more like a cave. I kept expecting people to start running out as claustrophobia sat in, I know I was about to at times.

After the cave the line entered another area that was larger than the cave but still felt a bit underground, more like an open cavern than the cave itself.

This picture is of the cavern, the cave was much smaller and seemed to be packed with more people. Yes, this is one line that circled to the back of the cavern and then up to the polling station.

Placing my vote I walked through each candidate one by one knowing that voting a straight ticket sometimes caused the voting machines to do funny things. In reviewing my ballot I found the voting machine had not registered several of my votes. This was easily fixed and I finally cast my vote. On my way out I chose not to complain to those running the election about the voting machine not accepting my ballot or theorizing the Russians were against some of those I voted for, I know that sometimes things just happen with computers. With my vote cast, I walked out of the polling place at 1:15, two and a half hours after arriving.

None of this is meant as a complaint against the voting process. Voting is a right that citizens of the U.S. enjoy and should be exercised by more of our citizen population. With that being said, I still don't understand why we can't vote online. I can access all my health and financial records online, making it possible for me to sit at home while managing my healthcare or transferring thousands of dollars even sometimes out of the country and never leave my desk. Surely there could be a way to securely establish an online voting system that has protections against voter fraud. It would probably be a pain to start with to meet requirements for being able to vote online and only a few percent of the voters may take advantage of it initially. It would, however, be a start that we could work from to improve over the course of several elections cycles. If we just sit back and wait for the perfect system to be implemented, it will never happen. Let's just get something started and go from there.