I took off at 11 this morning with the agenda of taking 5 minutes to vote and heading to Costco to look at something I’m considering buying. Whoa. There’s 150 cars parked around the library. Well, I’ll come back after lunch when the crowd has cleared out. Went to Costco, had lunch, laid on the couch to read for a while and promptly dozed off. At 2:30 the parking lot was still full so I sucked it up and headed on in. The line wound around a stack of books, probably a hundred people. The line was moving and in 30 minutes I reached the door to the cubicle where voting was taking place. There were 4 poll workers, all ladies, of an admirable racial and ethnic mix and 8 voting machines. When it was my turn I handed the lady my driver’s license and when she swiped it the, whole system croaked. She tried my card several times and a few other’s cards, but the software refused to budge. The little old lady who was running the laptop spoke my name as she was typing the letters in, bless her heart. One of the other officials got the help desk on the line. Many of us know how well that works out. I hope they weren’t calling someone in Moscow. Eventually they got the OK to go to plan B and pull out the backup system, another laptop and another printer. After getting all this booted up and re-entering the UID and password into the WiFi hotspot, voila, my ticket to vote. While we were waiting the hour all of this took the lady behind me in line and I were trying to give a little advice without violating any laws, like “that’s a USB cable, the plug will only go in one way and that’s not the way”. When I was leaving the library I heard someone calling my name and it was the other computer expert. She asked “are you Andy’s dad?”. I said “what’d he do now?”. She said “I’m David’s mom”. David & Andy were in High School in the early 90s. I asked “what’s David doing?” and she said “he’s working in a grow operation in Colorado”. I’m pretty sure I know how she voted.
I’ve lived here 36 years and I’ve never had to wait more than 10 minutes, early or election day. I’d estimate that 40% of those in line were Latin, south Asian or African American, including Buddhists with the red dot on their forehead. I did not see more than a handful that my radar would pick up as obviously infected with the Drumph virus. And this is Tom DeLay’s district.