I'm about to go to the local polling place and cast mein elektronischer Stimmzettel. Sure hope the software/hardware doesn't get hacked.

Anyone have stories about what this was like in their respective districts?

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I voted by absentee ballot in order to avoid any problems with the Diebold machines the great state of Maryland is now using. Then I found that the envelope I was given to return my ballot in was just slightly too small! I ended up having to take it apart, put the ballot in, tape it back together again, and then hand-deliver it to the elections commission (halfway across the county) in order to have any confidence that it would be counted.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I just voted using one of these. We´ve been doing it for 10 years now. So far, no complaints of hardware hacking [which I think is not so easy].

Attention must be paid to the providers of the Ballot Definition Files, the most vulnerable layer in the process.

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"Shut up and calculate" R. Feynman

In my district, we vote by digging a hole in the sand and then wispering the name of our chosen candidate. Eventually, reeds grow from the spot and tell passers-by who we voted for.

*blink*

Well, you got top marks for the satire, but then you reeled in massive bonus points for the relative obscurity of the referance. I believe we can safely call that post "teh winnar"

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Think I'm gonna skip this one. I've been pretty good about elections of late, but with it now noon, and me in no mood to put up with the lunch rush, I'll abstain.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Couldn't you just fold the ballot?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

The instructions specifically said not to fold the ballot in any other way than it was originally delivered.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I didn't vote at all 'cuz I live in Canader....

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

The place where I work is a Polling Place. At 6 AM it opened, and there was a line about 20 peaople deep for the next 90 minutes I was there. I don't recall it being like that last year, but there there really wasn't much going on that time.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek with think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

I voted a week ago. My schedule would've made it very difficult to get to the polling place today.

Some people complain about early voting but I love it. I can schedule voting more for my convience and it largely defuses the ability of politicians and the Press to pull last minute surprises in an attempt to sway the election. We had a major incident that got nationwide publicity here (Colorado Springs) just last week. The scandal's release was deliberately timed to influence voting on two ballot initiatives. Not that the scandal would've influenced me, but having already voted, I was completely immune to political mischief.

I voted absentee because I had a business trip scheduled for this week. According to NPR, there have been a few irregularities, but nothing terrible. Indiana was going to close the poles at 6PM, but the'll now be open till 8:45PM in some counties because they couldn't boot up the voting machines. (for example).

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Forming opinions as we speak

I voted early. The polling place is at the nearby library; I went by a little over a week ago, but the line was too long. Friday I stopped by and was the line.

Harris County uses the eSlate (picture). It's fairly easy to use, but a bit tedious; you have to make your selections with the finger wheel in the lower right corner.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Oregon is all vote-by-mail. Did it last week. Although I insist on riving by the courthouse and dropping the ballot in the collection box rather than going through USPS.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Man, some of the language in some of the new tax initiatives assumes the reader is brain dead. "And this new tax could be used for..."

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

I just checked the special box next to my mailbox, reserved for mailed campaign literature for the season.

Count: 63 pieces
Weight: 1 pound 14.4 ounces (0.862 kg)

Less than I expected it to be.

It's into the shredder now, and eventually into the compost pile, and in a year or two it will make my fruits and vegetables grow.

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

The beauty of living in the boondocks. Our precinct has a population of about 1200, And IIRC, about 700 of voting age. No line to speak of unless you intentionally gather up a few neighbors and storm the place.

My wife wasn't going to vote because she has not been paying any attention to the candidates. Then she found a "wizard" on line. You answer a bunch of questions on the issues of the day, and it spits out the candidates that most agree with your desires.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

"King Midas has donkey's ears"?

I know Thurston County is all by mail, and possibly all of Washington as well. I will be dropping by the courthouse (three blocks away!) to drop of my ballot this afternoon.

I was in college in 2000, and the line for the polling place in the library there was mad long all day. Usually, it was just me and the voting ladies.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It never ceases to amaze me that there is such a profusion of voting methods in the US. Here, it's always just "put an X next to the candidate you like."

Edit: spelling

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I walked to my polling place here in the Heart of Darkness this morning. The line wasn't too bad this year compared to the presidential election of 04 where the line went out of the building. I had about a 10 minute wait with 15 or so in line ahead of me at first. The infernal machines all seemed to be working.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Fills ya' with a load of confidence, don't it?