Election Day at Last

At 7:00am, I walked the 8 blocks to the local elementary school cafeteria to cast my vote in the current election. It was a brilliant sunny morning with a cloudless Santa-Ana-cleaned sky. There were two separate polling places in the cafeteria. My polling place was at the "orange" table.

There were 5 poll workers at the table, African-American, mostly elderly women. One looked me up by last name to find my address and had me sign next to my name. Three others checked identical lists of addresses and crossed me off. Internally, there was that feeling I get as a white person claiming my stake as a member of the neighborhood in front of my a group of black neighbors.

The election form for Los Angeles is a long narrow card with a grid of circular dots. It slots into a plastic frame where white cards with names of candidates and propositions have black arrows that point to dots on the form. A small, stubby black pen is tied to the plastic frame and is used to ink the dots. I was dissapointed to find that the arrows on the white cards didn't point exactly to the dots but instead a little below them, sometimes making it less that clear which dot I was supposed to choose.

I took the ballot to the last election worker at the table, where she tore off the ballot receipt from the top and gave it to me, and then placed the inked section into a locked box.

From what I could tell, at 7:30am at Virginia Road elementary school polling place, all was well. No bogus security guards, no electioneering, no corrupt Diebold voting machines, no unnecessary scarcity of ballots or voting machines. I hope it stays that way.