You must pull the switch and I must die

Whee. We went out and voted at our local cute old schoolhouse which was a million times cuter than Emily Dickinson, my old polling place in NYC. We didn't have to wait in line for anything. There was a decent sized line of election-day registrants. Minnesota got it lenient like that. Pretty much all college freshmen, it looked like. Two girls were walking out when we walked in and one of them was whining about how there were "waah, too many names." Oh, thank you for canceling out my vote with your idiocy.

Paper ballots, what a gyp. They hand you this ballot and a pen and a folder to carry it around in and you're on your own. You even feed it yourself into this ballot-reading machine which for all I know could have been a giant paper shredder. And then I got an "I Voted" sticker for being a good girl. I was hoping for the cool "draw a line to complete the arrow" business but no, it was "fill in circles next to the person's name" like a standardized test. We had like a zillion judicial slots to vote for and only like four of them were contested, so it was just filling in circles for the sake of filling in circles and it took too frigging long and ow my hand hurt.

I miss my old gigantic booths with the curtains and the spooooky lighting where you flip the switches and then pull that phat lever and it goes CATHHHHHUNK and you're like oooooh yeeeeah with satisfaction. Where I went today, all the little privacy tables were taken up so I had to sit on the gym floor and fill out my ballot in the wide open space like I was taking a quiz. For a moment I recaptured my youth! But it was weird.

Also? No bake sale. At Emily Dickinson, there was always a bake sale. Weak.

Posted by Kim at November 2, 2004 06:12 PM | Etc.