Paper ballots can get lost (or “lost” if you prefer) in the mail (once saw a road accident where a mail truck had caught fire and burned to the tires).
That may well be happening this year. Pretty much every account I’ve heard/read of people going into vote has described the places as being mobbed.
Ok, I’m a bit embarrassed about my fretting and borderline threadshitting upthread. Everybody please accept my apologies. I have changed my mind, and, in fact, voted today!
Electronic touchscreen, easy to use, no problems, paper trail. A not long, but steady line that kept getting replentished. Independence Library, on Irving Park Road. They were nice enough to provide a line of chairs though it was like a game of musical chairs because we kept getting up, moving down one, sitting down, getting up, moving down one, sitting down. The voting machines were on low tables and chairs were provided. I think there are a lot of elderly people in this district, though I saw people of all ages and races and nationalities. Around half a million people have voted early in the Chicago area so far. Tomorrow (Thursday 10/29) is the last day. I researched the judges before I went to vote, using the Windy City Times guide and a sample ballot that I took into the booth with me.
Chicago doesn’t do “I Voted” stickers. very sad
I had tears in my eyes when I touched the screen for Obama/Biden. I just sat there and stared at it for a few moments, taking in the historical moment. I still had tears in my eyes when I walked out of the voting room. Damn, that was powerful. Even though I live in the bluest city in the universe right now, it was still powerful. I think/hope a lot of people are going to vote where maybe they might not have otherwise from a “what difference does it make?” attitude, just because it’s dawning on more and more people that this is a historic election. I hope so anyway. I especially hope young people see it that way. They’re not just a part of history, they’re an active part of making history.
A few months ago I didn’t think I would vote. A couple of weeks ago I was cynical and suspicious. Now look, sitting in the voting booth with tears falling down my cheeks. Wow.
I can’t find a cite, but the local NPR station was saying that there’s been a record breaking turnout in TN for early voting. So much so, that they’re figuring lines on election day will be light. (Early voting in TN ends 10/30/08, BTW.)
Nope. Our polling place is in the school across the street, and since I have a dentist’s appointment (down the street) on election day morning, I’ll vote after it. It will feel good.
I changed my mind - I read that my area is expecting a record turnout (yay!) so I’m going in Friday and voting early. I’ll miss the feeling of voting on election day, but waiting in line is no fun.
I voted a week ago yesterday and waited in line for all of maybe two minutes. Reports are that we’re at least 50% over last year’s totals and are breaking all records.
I dropped off my ballot, my mom’s ballot, and my mom’s boyfriend’s ballot at the library this past Saturday.
What’s nice, at least in New Mexico, is that as long as you’re in the right county you can early vote at any location. So I drove all the way to Albuquerque to vote last Saturday (still registered there, being a student, and my absentee ballot application never went through) and got off the interstate in extreme southwestern Albuquerque to vote at a site deep in the South Valley (and probably 10+ miles from my normal polling place) where it had been reported that the wait times were the shortest.
So, once I found it (overshot the correct exit and had to backtrack) there was no wait, filled out my optical scan ballot in about 10 minutes (would have been faster if it wasn’t for all the yes/no judge retention votes), and did the other stuff I planned to do that weekend.
Call me a sucker for the ritual. Voting early seemed like a bit of a hassle, and I want to be out there with the crowd, so I’ll do what I did in 2004 and try to be the first person at my polling place. I think I was about 12th then, but this time I live about two minutes away. Of course I may show up at 6 and find myself waiting for hours. Who knows.
I’ll be absentee-voting in person (VA doesn’t let you vote early), since I’ll be working for the campaign basically whenever I can on Monday and Tuesday. I don’t think my Poli Sci professor will mind me missing his class, somehow.
… how does it make your life easier for my one vote to be cast today, rather than on the 4th? Are you volunteering in St. Paul?
Not voted yet. My wife is pressuring me to vote early because she thinks I’ll forget. Bear in mind that she has been volunteering full-time for the DFL for the past year or so, and every table in the house is piled high with literature. I could forget to vote like I could forget to breathe. Actually, forgetting to breathe would probably be less painful…
I voted yesterday for the first time since 1992. I normally have an aversion to the whole process of voting and politics, and harbor a deep chord of suspicion and distrust for a democracy controlled by a population more interested in Lindsay Lohan’s sexual partners than hundreds of billions of dollars poured into one man’s egotistical adventure in the desert. But John McCain stood up, spoke up, and convinced me that my vote counts; that even if it doesn’t significantly effect the resulting election, that I couldn’t just stand by and not cast an opinion. Yes, thank you John McCain, for running one of the nastiest, divisive, pestiferous campaigns in living memory, and then topping it off with a running mate and prospective Jimmy who isn’t qualified to run a PTA meeting much less the world’s largest military establishment and arguably most influential economy. If you wanted the chick vote you could have gone for any number of qualified Republican women–Kay Hutchison is arguably more qualified than you are in all ways except giving blowjobs to the Fundamentalist nutjobs running the RNC–and I would have been utterly indifferent, but your bizarre and completely illogical choice inveighed me into action. God bless you, John McCain, may you rot in hell you dumb son of a bitch.
Oh, and as much as I was indifferent to California’s Proposition 8 (not that I don’t support the right of homosexuals to be just as miserable, frustrated, and trapped as heterosexuals in the union of marriage, but I just don’t have a dog in the fight) the “Vote Yes On 8…For The Children” advocates pushed me out of my deep well of indifference and into raw anger about the attempt to manipulate me like a marionette. The highway billboard with a small child clutching a puppy, captioned, “Protect the Children…Vote Yes on 8,” nearly had me procuring and using some detcord to drop it face down. The only way they could have gotten more absurd would be to show a zombie Freddy Mercury raping a kitten.
So, yes, I voted, reluctantly and against deeply held principles. Now excuse me while I go take a shower and wipe the slime off.
Stranger
I haven’t voted yet. My mother has, however. I could have voted then, myself, when I picked up her absentee ballot. And sometimes I think I should have. My father is insisting on voting in person on election day. And I have a different polling place than he does, since I don’t actually reside with him. (It just feels that way lately.)
But I want to use those mechanical computers one last time. Let’s hear it for state-of-the-lost-arts fifties machines! 
More seriously, I’m sure I’ll want to have the excuse to get out of the house alone next Tuesday.