Flashes of Panic

That’s what my very first CS professor wrote on the blackboard in early November 1992. By then, I had already mailed an absentee ballot back to Maine. They encourage students to vote absentee in their home states, around here, so I was ahead of the curve.

Anyway, this morning the polls were opening around when our run started, so we stopped by our polling place five minutes after they opened the doors. The line was out the door by about 20 people, the longest line I’ve seen in the three presidential elections where I didn’t vote absentee. We decided to come back later because we could, so we did our workout and stopped by again on the cooldown. The line was still out the door, but only by five or six people, so we got in it, then discovered that there were 25 or 30 people in line inside the door.

We sat it out and voted anyway, and the line was longer when we came out.

At least in our precinct, the hold-up was not mechanical. There were plenty of booths and the machine that was scanning ballots was seldom backed up by more than one or two people. The hold-up was the distribution of ballots. On arrival at the head of the line, each voter announced their street name, then number, then their name, so two people could look them up in two separate voter rolls and confirm we were registered voters. Only then did we get two ballots (one with all the state and national offices and ballot questions, and a second which was only the town select board election) and go to vote.

The same process was repeated again before the ballots could be put in the tally machine. This wasn’t a bottleneck, though, because the rate of voters arriving at that table was controlled by the previous table’s bottleneck, and therefore never greater than these two people could handle.

It’s a fraud check, I know, and a relatively effective one given that I as a voter already on the rolls didn’t need to present ID, but they’d definitely get everyone through faster if it could be made quicker.

There’s reports of long lines throughout MA, but I haven’t heard of anyone I know waiting more than an hour to vote, so I guess our system works decently well. I really hope we do set a voter turnout record, as predicted; the old record is downright pathetic.

Polls close in this state in an hour and a half. I don’t intend to wait up to get projections from other time zones; I’ll find out from the front page of the morning newspaper, the old-fashioned way. I hope.

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