Archive for January 8th, 2008
My vote
It didn’t take long for me to register to vote in New Hampshire. I showed my passport, which, oddly enough was described by the official as feeling wet; I told her that I ran it through a washing machine long ago, but I didn’t think it was wet. Then I showed a utility bill and filled out a form. That effort earned me a white piece of paper that said, “Okay to vote.” Excellent!
More notable was my utter confusion about where to go and where to be to accomplish anything. I initially stood in the wrong line to register. After receiving and completing my ballot, I stood in the correct place to submit it, but wasn’t told that I was in the right place. After lolly-gagging there for a minute, I made eye-contact with another voter, who seemed like a veteran of the process, and she indicated that I needed to be in the line that she was in. I stood there for a few minutes before learning that that was, of course, the wrong place and where I’d been before that was the correct place. Though all the necessary posters – what to do if you needed assistance, who to contact about your voter rights, and how to mark a ballot – were in place, a few signs indicating the function of all the lines would have helped me. That said, I had nowhere to be and the lines weren’t long at all. I was in and out of Town Hall in, I’d guess, 15 minutes.
Finally, it’s sickly warm here. If this report is correct, we reached a record high for today and the air is 27 degrees above the average high. This should facilitate voters’ treks to their polling places. I wonder, too, if we’ll get any quotes from undeclared voters about being finally moved to vote Democrat because, today, t-shirts and jeans are appropriate outdoor dress and, well, that’s a little worrisome.
