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Voted This Morning

My Saturday morning was free so I went and voted at the Carrboro Town Hall poll. Having the poll open at 8 AM made it very convenient.

The poll was staffed by volunteers from my community, my neighbors. The woman who checked my name and address and printed out my ballot recognized my name and introduced herself as the mother of a friend of my son's from high school. Representatives from the local Democratic and Republican parties were there to supervise the process.

Voting consisted of my taking a clearly labeled Scantron sheet and filling in the ovals with a pen. I fed my ballot to a scanner, which confirmed that my ballot had been read and stored my ballot in case of a recount.  I arrived when the poll opened, with five of my neighbors ahead of me. I left seven minutes later.

Annually at election time voters in the poorer areas of Durham, a half hour away, stand in line for hours. It is a regular and predictable news story. Sometimes because they come straight from work they are told that the polls have closed after they've waited that time.


1) Election deniers insult my neighbors without evidence, without knowing their names, without having ever met them. F**k them.

2) Ease of voting is based on community resources for staffing polls. As community resources vary according to wealth distribution this is an automatic bias in favor of the affluent such as myself. Poll resources need to be provided by a larger collective source---state or federal---to eliminate such an incredibly obvious bias.

Folk who seek to limit when to vote are evil. The excuses of voter fraud never seem to have any evidence behind them.

3) I have lived in Carrboro/Chapel Hill for most of my life, using Scantron ballots. I have never understood the desire to use electronic-only machines without paper ballot back-up for recounts. Are scanners for sheets more expensive? That seems unlikely.

The hanging-chad ballots in Florida for Bush v. Gore in 2000 left me gobsmacked. Again, why use such a system when standardized testing with scanners have been around for so many decades?

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