In a place I used to live, let’s call it Joliet Il., I voted in someone’s garage that was accessible from the alley. Today I vote in a Christian church where there are never any religiously inclined folks preaching to me, or pushing literature, or even visibly present. At least three precincts vote there, and I thank them for their service to democracy.
I vote at a local Sportsmen’s Club. The most rednecky place you can imagine.
Coastal town north of Boston here, and we vote in the gym of the local YMCA. Sign-holders congregate along Route 1 by the driveway leading to the gym parking lot but can’t go down there.
When I first moved to my current house in suburban Cook County, my polling place was also in someone’s garage. After a few years, the county finally changed the rules, and prohibited having polling places in private homes, so they moved our precinct’s location to the cafeteria at the local Catholic grade school.
That was also when I first started voting, so I figured that was just how it was done. I knew other people voted elsewhere, but it didn’t seem weird at all.
The last time I voted in-person it was a school, I believe. But I remember doing it at a church once upon a time. Nothing felt weird about it, it was no different than going anywhere else to do it.
My state has offered 100% vote-by-mail for a very long time, so it has been over a decade since I’ve done any of that.
Phila has voting in churches. The voting happens in the community space, not the actual sanctuary.
Al least once I know of, there was a service going on, there was a wall between the hall and the church service. The voters and poll workers got quite the earful as the church was Russian orthodox and in Church Slavonic.
We can’t get the Wi-Fi working in the place I’m staying right now, so this would be a perfect time for vote by mail to be entirely separated from my own home Wi-Fi signal.
OCS? I remember when I was studying Russian in university, and the prof said that a modern Russian could mostly understand OCS, but that a modern English speaker would barely be able to understand Middle English, let alone Old English (which is closest to the OCS for English).
That would mostly be because English is not so much a language as it is a raving Taz-like scourge that goes around molesting other languages, rifling their pockets for lex change and chewing on the take with sharp teeth until it is barely recognizable to the original owner.
The Slavic languages, by contrast, huddled together behind a щяll of cyrillic and fought off the english beast with guttural cries, coming through almost unscathed, save for a decimation of their vowels left for dead on the field of battle.
Yep, ocs. There are some words that will give one an odd look, and pronunciation differences, but for the most part it is like Latin and Italian.
I know more Church Slavonic than I do modern Russian.
My theory is that France won the vowels and Poland won the consonants. Only explanation of those languages.
Here in Maricopa county you can walk into any polling place, called a voting center, on election day. A wireless WAN (not the internet) connects with the registrar’s Db, and a ballot printed out for you with the proper offices on it. I have no idea of the specs on the wireless connection but there are going to be EM activity galore at the site.
Just about all the places I’ve voted in my life, including the early voting I mostly do these days, have been at churches. The first place I ever voted, however, was at a local auto dealership. No one tried to sell me a car while I was there.
Most of the polling places in my city seem to be public libraries or city run recreation centers.
That was truly awesome.
Speaking of languages, we’ve been watching a French series about a forensic doctor called Balthazar. We’re enjoying it quite a bit. One thing that’s amused me is how many English words are used. I can remember when I was young hearing about the French Academy’s stiff resistance to adopting foreign words. They must have given up.
One that they used in the episode we watched last night was “blackout.”
The actor playing Balthazar sprinkles his speech with a ton of English words anyway. He had to pretend to be an American last night, and the few words he said were pretty convincing. Much better than the obviously French actor pretending to be the American Balthazar stole from!
And the joke about English is that it’s the result of Norman men-at-arms trying to make dates with Saxon barmaids.
Someone needs to learn when to use a and an.
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