2.11.04

I Voted

I've got one of those stickers garnishing my lapel right now.
I voted (suckas)...

I think my voting experience was pretty interesting. Kind of in the same way that carnie folk are interesting. Sort of 'please don't touch me with that mangled hand just keep the tilt-a-whirl going' scary/interesting.

I wasn't sure where to go to vote. I woke up early and went to the closest elementary school to my crib. That wasn't the right place. They were however able to tell me where to go. Precinct 462 is my number and the voting location is at 1700 South Lamar St, at the MHMR Annex, okay that's close. So I got back in my car and I went to the MHMR Annex. For those of ya'll who don't know, MHMR is a division of Texas Health and Human Services. The letters stand for Mental Health and Mental Retardation. Apparently this is the place where they do a lot of hiring at my job and judging from what went on at the polling place this is also where they got the people manning the polls.

Now I'm not trying to be mean or jugdemental or anything negative I'm just going to tell you exactly what happened when I got to this polling place. First thing that I found "interesting" was that the girl in line behind me was obviously retarded. I'm not describing her in the playground sense of retarded or even the W. sense of the word, I mean clinically in a mongoloid sense of the word the poor girl was slighly retarded. So the line is out the door at 7:30am and we are all standing out in the cold and people are passing around instructions for the electronic voting machines. The girl in front of me passes me the instruction sheet after she is finished with it. The instructions seem a little complicated. When I am done reading it I turn to the girl behind me and ask if she would like to see the instructions. She says no. She takes this quick interaction as her cue to start talking to me. She starts talking, at sort of an unregulated volume, about how she is going to vote for Bush. Then she starts saying how she didn't like it when John Kerry was saying bad things about the President. I have to say she started to make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I don't think the polls are an appropriate place for a political discussion so I just sort of shook my head in an ambiguous manner that could have been interpreted many ways. Luckily she didn't pursue her line of thought and she generally quieted down.

So then when I am finally close enough to the ballot boxes to be inside the building one of the machines created some problems. This lady was voting and she turned to one of the attendants to tell him that the battery light was flashing on the electronic voting machine. This sent all the voting attendants into a slight panic. The first dude tells another dude and he didn't know what to do so he tells another dude and that dude starts repeating in a Rainman kind of way "we gotta call the troubleshooter, yeah definitely the trouble shooter." I swear he said troubleshooter 15 times before he finally got the number from the lady who was running the main computer box. There seemed to be a lot of panic over one little battery light. They sequestered that machine and the lady got to vote on another machine. It was kind of funny but it was also kind of deeply disturbing in the sense of "Who are these fools manning the polls."

I finally got my chance to vote. It went swell. The machines were kind of confusing and the poor retarded girl was having a tough time with it. She kept having to call over one of the attendants. He would help her with one part of the ballot and step away and not two seconds later she was calling him back over saying "Sir, sir, now what do I do?"

The coolest part was that after you cast your ballot this nifty animated graphic a waving stars and stripes came up on the screen let you know that your vote had been cast.
God Bless America.


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