My broken election adventure.

I like voting in person because there's a feeling of ceremony about it. My polling place this election has moved from the local firehouse to a community room upstairs in an apartment building a block from me.

Things did not go great. First there was a hair on the marker that made streaks occur way outside the circles I filled in. So I go to replace the ballot. (1/x)

I get stuck behind some blowhard getting his ballot, complaining about how the receipts aren't attached to the actual ballots on the tablet they are pulled from anymore so they can get mixed up. He had a valid point, but complaining to election volunteers and anyone else voting (like me for example) on election day does not solve it. (2/x)

I eventually get my replacement ballot and the guy won't shut up. Even while he's voting. Telling the election worker to call his boss and ask why he wasn't taught this in his training and how he used to be a volunteer but they won't let him anymore etc etc.

(3/x)

He gets done and brags about how he leaves most of it blank out of protest and how ranked voting is algorithms that we don't even know what's going on with and fracking is top secret proprietary technology that we don't know about. Really staying on topic.

He finally leaves. My new ballot is mostly free of extra marks, but looking at the inky streaks from previous voters inside of the privacy sleeve, clearly the ink in the pens they provide suck and don't dry fast enough. Whatever.(4/x)