Have you voted yet?
I can't get over the fact that it's 5:10pm and I'm still getting calls from various candidates. I remember that in 2004 we thought we were home free when the polls closed. Then we got a "thank you for voting" recorded call!
I a bit disappointed in my voting experience this year. I thought we had changed our addresses with the Board of Elections when I changed them at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, but apparently I didn't change Scott's. I guess I could have checked on mine. He voted first, on his way to work, and called to say our polling location had changed (even though we now live closer to our original one) and he had to fill out a bunch of forms and then cast a provisional ballot. So I did the same. My ballot won't even be counted for a day or two.
Plus they changed our ballotting process. We had the punch cards before, and I rather like them. You could hold them up and see for sure if you had punched through each thing. And the ballot itself was nice and compact -- just slide your card into the machine and flip the pages.
Today I had two monstrous sheets of paper with monstrous ovals to darken with a pen. These huge sheets then got fed into a scanner and read like a Scantron test from college. Issues and candidates were included on both sides of these pages. Then I heard someone talking this morning about how he had to fill in rectangles! I really hope that he was in a different county and therefore had a different ballot. Because otherwise one of us voted wrong!
I find voting somewhat frustrating. No matter how much research I do, I always get to the polls and find people listed that I haven't read anything about. It happened again today, and I was SURE I had educated myself well enough.
I've always loved the bumper sticker I saw once that read, "This fall, fire them all! Re-elect nobody!" So I finally decided that if I had nothing else to go on, I'd vote against the incumbent.
I am very interested to see what happens in Ohio tonight (or tomorrow...or the next day, if the election is close). Two years ago it was really close between Republicans and Democrats. I think there's a very good chance it will swing Democratic this year -- so many people are upset about all the scandals at the state level (which currently leans Republican) and about the war in Iraq.
Soon as I get the kids to bed, I'll be hitting the knitting and the election results! And maybe some ice cream. And decaf. All I need to make it perfect is my husband (who's out tonight at a meeting at our alma mater) and a fire in the fireplace.
