I voted this morning. It was a less pleasant experience than I’ve had before. Denver used to have precinct-based polling. My polling place was two blocks away. There were usually four or five voting machines, and I seldom had to wait in line more than 15-20 minutes before voting.<\/p>\n
This election, Denver is not doing voting by precinct; there are 55 polling stations scattered throughout the city, and you can vote at any one of them. I was in line for two hours before I got to vote, and the line was longer when I left than when I arrived. There were 20 voting machines, but verifying voter eligibility was the bottleneck – I never saw more than about 5 or 6 voting machines simultaneously in use.<\/p>\n
Since anyone could vote at any station, the election workers didn’t have books with listings of people who could vote there; they had laptops that connected to a central server. With 20 voting machines, we had 4 laptops. Verifying a voter took about 3-4 minutes, thus, the bottleneck.<\/p>\n
Another innovation was that people voting absentee could drop off their absentee ballots at the polling station. There was a large red wooden box with metal straps and padlocks and an insertion slot sitting near the voting machines. When I got to the head of the line, shortly before 10am, the box was overfull, with envelopes sticking out of the slot. I have to admit that I’m not pleased with that situation.<\/p>\n
The only good part was the young woman behind me in line – she borrowed my pen to fill out her signature card. When I filled out mine, she said, “Oh, we’re neighbors.” I asked her address, then said to her, “Oh, you’re just the other side of the highway. If you hear banjo or ukulele music drifting north some warm evening, it’s me.”<\/p>\n
Her eyes got large, and she said, “I know who you are! I work for Marion!” So we had a nice discussion while slowly shuffling forward.<\/p>\n
I knew that I lived in a liberal stronghold, but I hadn’t realized quite how much. Diana DeGette is my congresscritter, having taken Pat Shroeder’s spot. The last time I looked at the election results, Ms. DeGette was the projected winner with about 78% of the vote. Her opponent had 21%. He’s in the Green party. There was no Republican running … I don’t think any<\/i> Republican could be elected in my district.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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