Wednesday, November 5, 2008

my chad

Warning: in light of the many touching and reflective posts on yesterday's election, I am countering with something totally and completely myopic. (After all, I started this blog because there weren't enough people around to listen to me, me, me.)

Yesterday's voting:

1. I realized an hour before voting that I hadn't studied any candidates except for presidential. I quickly looked through my voting guide and committed to my candidates of choice (Abe, what does your public opinion formation research say about that?)

2. When I got to the polls I realized I left my voting notes from #1 at home. I couldn't remember my candidate names. Hour-before commitment only goes so far.

3. The "system" didn't have my name in it. **scrambling of papers, looking at IDs, checking computers** But the other "system" did, so I got a ballot.

4. In the voting booth, I marked the wrong sherrif. It was one of the only candidates I remembered my decision on, so I wanted to do it right. I mean, this is the sherrif we're talking about. I had to get a replacement for my spoiled ballot. Which caused a new round of people to deal with issue #3 again. Problems 3 & 4 backed up the line by about 20 people.

5. After voting, I mentioned to Abe that I couldn't remember voting for the 2 propositions on the ballot. He asked me if I had turned the ballot over. Hm. Come to think of it, the ballot had seemed short.

6. The only candidates (besides presidential) that I felt strongly about were the school board. When I got home and checked my left-behind voting notes, I realized that I had voted for the wrong people on the board.

This year, I hope that a single vote didn't make a difference.

6 comments:

Rita said...

Well, did your Sherrif win by one vote?

Margaret said...

I had a similar experience - but fortunately the democrats sent me a ballot to tell me exactly who was good. But then the republicans did the same thing and it was different! Poor me. I was so confused.

Sarah said...

Good thing your vote doesn't matter. You really should have used the electronic voting...we had an option to use either. The electronic was very fast and allowed for easy fixes. Good for old people...

Megan said...

I left my candidate choosing to the 5 minutes before going to vote, so I did not remember much from my "research" either. I also filled in a wrong bubble for one of the few I remembered, but did not know that they would give me a new ballot. Hopefully we do better next election!

Dawn said...

I guess you could call this a learning experience! And you'll have a fun story to tell your children years from now when they wonder what all the fuss was about way back in 2008!

Mary Poppins said...

once i accidentally voted for the entire republican ticket. to make matters worse, i'm pretty sure it was in 2004 and i can assure you i wasn't planning on trying to reelect bush. needless to say, i had to wait in line to get a new ballot, too. it happens to the best of us.