lifebsideben

I wanted to be able to vote and also get to work at a reasonable time, so when the baby woke up crying at 5am, it seemed like a good plan to stay up, and get to the polls as they opened at 7am here. I read a bunch of email, surfed the web a bit, and ended up at my polling place (a church in Burlingame) at 7:00 on the dot. There were already about 10 people for each of three districts in line, and I’d say the average age was 40. I was heartened to see someone younger than myself at the registration table, but then realized they weren’t voting, just tagging along with their mom After a quick 10-minute wait in line, I gave my name to the lady checking names; she was 75 if she was a day. The names are pretty small, and she actually crossed off the name underneath mine accidentially! I looked and saw “Ben Miller” crossed off, and said whoa–wait a minute–that guy is my neighbor and is going to be really pissed off if he can’t vote. She was apologetic and said “I’ll make a note here next to his name, that he hasn’t actually voted.” Hmm. I hope she’s still working when he shows up… Minor drama complete, I finally did vote, which was actually a bit more challenging than I had expected: while I had a sample ballot filled out with my choices in my pocket, there had been slight changes between that one and the actual one, including at least one category where extra candidate(s) had been slotted in. There weren’t really enough of those little collapsable-table-with-shield things, but my neighbors apparently weren’t too worried: several people were (voluntarily) voting with their ballots on a round table nearby, in plain view. When I scanned my ballot in the machine, it was #11 in my precinct. Cool. Not so cool is that I then sat in traffic for an hour to get to work (my typical commute is less than half that…) Blah.

By the way, my kid can’t vote for about 18 more years… but he’s already an activist:

Tags: burlingame, voting