Today I checked off another one of the tasks on my ‘Americanization’ list (note how I used a zee there!) by voting in a presidential election – a right conferred upon only U.S. Citizens (I naturalized in 2009), and only taken away if you’re a convicted felon (which I’m not). But as noted in previous posts, they really should be a bit more selective, as there are a lot of stupid people who really shouldn’t be allowed to vote, judging by the number of slack-jawed, shoddily-dressed dimwits trying to get into the polling station through the out door despite the many signs and arrows leading to the door round the other side of the building. You know, the door with the mile-long queue outside it. Yeah, that’s right – that queue is just for everyone else. You’re special. That’s why we’ve kept this other door – labeled “EXIT” just for you… Idiots.
The election isn’t until Tuesday 6th (it’s always the first Tuesday in November, every four years (none of this British “we’ll call an election when it’s most advantageous to us” malarkey)), but you can do ‘early voting’ if you want to beat the rush. Today is the last day of early voting, so I decided I’d nip out of work in my lunch hour and get it over and done with. Unfortunately the queue was a couple of hundred deep, so I gave up and went back later in the day. By which time the queue had doubled in size. So much for avoiding the rush. Anyway, at this stage I figured it was only going to get worse, so joined the queue, in eighty degree Houston heat, doing my best to ignore the smell wafting over from the sewage treatment plant across the road from the polling station. Or at least pulling my best ‘disgusted’ expression while looking at the person in front of me in the queue, in case the other people in the line thought I’d shat myself…
As it turns out, it only took about an hour and a half to reach the door, which I was informed was ‘not bad’. Not really how I’d prefer to spend my afternoon, but still. It’s a civic duty, and I wouldn’t feel justified in whinging if the result doesn’t go the way I want, if I didn’t do my part.
Once I got in, I discovered why it takes so long – the ballot had a full 187 votes on it – for everything from “who should be president” to “who should be judge of the 24,578th district court”, plus a question on whether the Metro revenue should continue to be siphoned off to pay for road repairs elsewhere. Fortunately, most positions are being contested by a person of one political persuasion versus a person of another political persuasion, so at the start of the ballot is a question that asks you if you just want to vote for everything along partly lines, and then defaulted ALL of your choices based on that. Interestingly, the wording of this first question was “straight democrat” vs. “straight republican” which confused me a bit as I assumed that ALL republicans were straight anyway. How else would you explain their appalling attitudes towards gay rights?
Thankfully, the whole ‘hanging chad’ debacle has been neatly sidestepped this time around (at least here in Texas), and voting is entirely electronic. Almost. You go in, give the your voter registration card or driver’s license to someone, and they manually key this information into a laptop that then prints a sticky label with a barcode on it. This is then handed to another person (sat right next to the first person), who scans it into another laptop, which then prints out a ticket with a number on it, which they then give to you. You then have to wander over to a portable polling booth (a table with a kid’s playtent over it), and enter this number into another machine, which then lets you vote. I don’t know why I couldn’t just swipe my driver’s license or voter registration card into this last machine, but I guess it’s some form of measure to avoid voter fraud. That, or keeping the various ‘data processors’ in a job.
The actual voting machines are about the size of iPads, so I did have high hopes of a high-tech solution, but no. The screen isn’t a touchscreen, and despite this being clearly stated on many posters, on the screen itself, and being announced by the many aged ‘ushers’, didn’t stop several would-be voters from jabbing furiously away at the screen before calling someone over for assistance. Personally, I’d see this as some kind of IQ test to confirm that should be allowed to vote and just tell them that if they can’t figure it out they can’t vote and should just go back home to their trailer-park. But that’s probably why I’m not in charge.
In fact, the only controls for the voting machines are a large dial and an Enter button. You use the dial to scroll through the ballot questions and options on the screen, which is quite like the early non-touch iPods. I’m guessing that the polling machine manufacturers must have realized that 99% of the population is familiar with this type of control already and decided to just adopt the Apple design (I smell a lawsuit!). But then they ruined it by apparently deciding that pushing down on the scroll dial (kind of like you do on an iPod) wasn’t intuitive enough, and instead require you to press the Enter button right next to it, instead. Jonathan Ive must’ve face-palmed himself when he saw that. As it was, I could hear the chump in the next booth slapping the button, and muttering about how it “done broke”. Again, if you’re too stupid to follow the instructions on the screen (in any of the four supported languages – seriously? is the reading and writing part of the Naturalization Test for nothing, then??) you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
The downside to this minimalist approach to data entry is that you need to scroll through every question and every choice to get through the entire ballot. Even if you just choose to vote along party lines. Which took me a good five minutes, even skipping over a lot of them (I’m sorry, but I don’t know Billy-Bob Buckwheat (Dem.) from James William Feinstein III (Rep.) and certainly don’t know which one of them will make the best junior assistant (to the) county clerk). To be fair, some positions only had one person standing for them (presumably the incumbent) which speeds things up, but that does make me wonder why we are voting on that position at all. Surely the only person standing automatically wins? Unless literally no-one votes for them (even themselves, which would be a bit daft), in which case who does get the position?
Anyway, aside from the big question of “who should be President?” (for which I would have liked to be able to select an option of “Neither of these chumps” the only question I really paid attention to was the vote on Metro funding (I voted against using Metro funds to repair roads in other areas [sorry, Ly, I just negated your vote…] – I want a light railway up and down the I-10!). Sure, call me ill-informed, but I defy anyone to be fully informed on the 187 things being voted on, and know enough about each and every candidate to make an informed decision. Even given the all-pervasive political advertisements that have been forced upon us for the past two years, and assorted wives of delegates milling around outside insisting that their husband deserved to be voted in.
But after all’s said and done, I did vote. For the first time in America, and for the first time in a long while anywhere. I think the last time I voted Margaret Thatcher was on the ballot. Bless her. And no, I didn’t. Now all I need to do is get ready for Tuesday night, when the counts come in, and I can vent my righteous indignation at the fact that the stupid people have once again managed to fuck things up for all of us.
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* It’s just a shame it seems to last for three of those
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