A carnival of technology

I don’t want to get too opiniony here today, because everyone’s had about enough of that. Barack Obama announced his candidacy on February 10th, 2007, John McCain on the 25th of the following April. Nearly two years. Two years this election has been in headlines, filled the airwaves, been a backdrop during financial collapse, ongoing wars in the Middle East and new unrest in Central Asia, earthquakes and floods and hurricanes. Two years. This is it. And whatever happens tonight, we’re watching history.

Georgia has been early-voting since late September, but that whole idea never appealed to me. It feels like cheating. The law is clear: after the Sabbath following the bringing in of the harvest, it’s time to hitch up the wagon and make a trip into a town to cast your vote on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November; thus it is our solemn duty as citizens of this great country to suffer through all of the campaigns’ final surprises, thrusts and dying gasps until it comes time to appoint our Electors on Election Day. Plus there were like two million people trying to early vote. It was nuts; wait times averaged about three hours. If I’m going to have to wait three hours I’m doing it the patriotic way.

Today began as most days do on mornings after I’ve set my alarm for an earlier time: I woke up around 8 with the realization that I didn’t actually turn the alarms on and rushed through a panicked blur of clothes and toothpaste and hot water and orange juice. The annoyingly re-dated Daylight Saving Time switch helped out today, though, since 7 still feels like 8, and, while I couldn’t get in line before the polls opened, I at least wasn’t starting terribly behind. Grab a book, get a coffee from the Citgo and off I go to exercise my rights as an American citizen.

There have been a handful of elections since I moved to Sandy Springs–the 2006 midterm elections, the presidential primaries this year, the statewide primaries and a handful of local things–and it seems like my polling location changes every single time, swapping between the High Point Elementary and Ridgeview Middle schools. I really don’t know why, maybe something to do with expected turnout and how fine-grained a particular precinct needs to be for a particular set of ballot questions. It’s confusing. Poll workers periodically walked up and down the lines today reminding us that the state of Georgia really can require photo ID to vote this time around–the law got a shout-out in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and everything–and trying to explain who should be in this line and who should be a in a different line at the middle school down the road. Your voter information card is a lie, the web site might not be accurate; through all the last-minute registrations and address changes and other complications, it all came down to which side of a two-lane residential road you live on, and just pray that the computer at the front of the line agrees. I only saw one person cut to the front of the line having earned his credit waiting for a couple of hours in the other one, so I guess you could say it went smoothly for the time I was there.

For myself, voting didn’t take too terribly long. I found an illegal parking spot a couple of blocks from school at about 7:30, and I was out of there by 9. Everyone was prepared for a long wait–I had my book and tiny radio tuned to NPR, some people had chairs, a lady in front of me was reading Twilight, but we didn’t need our little comforts for long.

One thing I noticed while waiting was that the poll workers seemed younger than usual. There were the usual octogenarians tapping away at the awkward registration roll computers, but there were also a bunch of people there in their twenties or younger. Georgia’s current system in this world of tomorrow is to have voters fill out a card with name and address by hand, take that to someone checking IDs, take the freshly initialed card through another series of lines to someone who looks up the registration and formats a smart card, and then take the card to a touch-screen Premier Election Solutions (né Diebold) voting machine. The ballot was eleven screens long–president, senator, John Lewis running unopposed again, county surveyor (“As there are very few duties for the county surveyor, i will serve to best of my abilities when required to perform my duties.”), a whole mess of mostly unopposed, incumbent judges, a handful of state amendments and some homestead exemption referendums. I tapped away for a bit, hit the “Cast Vote” button and traded the ejected card for a peach sticker. And that was it. I voted.

And now, in the immortal words of the fourteenth president of this great nation, “There’s nothing left but to get drunk.” Barring some kind of 2000-style fiasco, by tomorrow, or maybe even a little later tonight, we’ll have elected the forty-fourth leader of this diverse and fertile land so blessed by Providence. Let’s hope he’s a good one.