Voting Day!

Sorry, I have about four half-written blog posts about cool NPR stories that I haven't gotten around to finishing, but it's election day! NPR is full of stories about electioneering, voter fraud, and general voter excitement, which is what I experienced.

Today was my last ever vote at a real polling place because King County is going absentee-only after this election. Given that 90% of King County votes absentee already, I was really surprised to see the crowds at the polling station this morning, and excited crowds at that! Unlike some places on the East Coast, I only had to wait about a minute before checking in and getting my ballot, but there were more people there than I'd ever seen in an election, including the last presidential election.

It's really too bad that we're going to get rid of this opportunity for educating our kids and just getting together to do our duty as citizens, especially since in order to tally absentee ballots we apparently have to go through a lot of rigmarole (see this description from The Stranger). There are also lots of stories of people who have signatures on their ballot envelopes that don't match their signatures on record, or who accidentally signed their ballots and invalidated them (you can't sign the actual ballot, just the envelope). Does this really seem like a good system?

Either way, happy voting everyone! And if you haven't yet (and you live in WA), go vote Yes on I-1000.