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We walked down to our local polling station, the elementary school around the corner, and voted.
It's an absolutely beautiful day here in Oakland. Blue sky, sunny, must be 70F.
The big surprise at the polling station was the paper ballots. After all the controversy about electronic voting machines, and then the mechanical card punching machines, Alameda county threw them all out and reverted back to the paper ballots of the 19th Century.
I must say this was a bit of a relief. And the other folks in the polling station, including the poll workers, seemed very pleased.
To cover all the issues on the ballot, we were given two large, heavy stock ballots, printed on both sides. Each page was about the size of a page of the NY Times. The polling booth was just a table with a cheap ball point pen taped to a string that was attached to the table. (A marking pen would have been better.) The instructions were to draw a line in the space near the name or item you were voting for. Very simple, and I got thru the ballot in about a minute.
The poll worker took the pages and inserted them into an electronic page reader that recorded the vote (hopefully accurately). I understood that the paper ballots themselves will be retained for some period of time in case of a recount. We were given the labels that were torn off the ballots, and these seem to have a sequential number on them.
All well and good. This is technology that most people can understand and believe in. Those electronic voting machines lack a certain credibility.
Still, we can expect that the vote in some precincts around the country will be rigged. There's already a report out that in some areas in Virginia poor people are getting threatening phone calls telling them that they will be arrested if they showed up to vote. The FBI is "investigating".
Even here in California there were some dirty tricks. We all received flyers in the mail that looked like they came from the Democratic party, with recommendations on what to vote for, except the propositions had the opposite of what the real Democratic party was recommending. This even made it to the local TV news, where they uncovered it was coming from Republican funded campaigns to defeat many of those propositions.
Even our President got into the swing of things, almost to the point of claiming that to vote for Democrats was to vote for the terrorists. This technique did work well for the Nazis in elections in Germany in 1933. The Republicans have an interesting take on democracy.
So now we sit and wait for the tallies to start coming in. And the challenges. Apparently there are thousands of lawyers ready to file court challenges against various races around the country. This is how democracy works, or so it seems.
All I know is that rarely do the folks I vote for win. This time I might be surprised. We'll see.
