It was dark-thirty at 7 a.m. this morning when I stopped at the North Tampa Library to place my vote.
A little surreal... the lady in front of me made quite a lot of noise about my perfume causing her asthma to kick in. I put a lot of space between her and me, and when I entered into the balloting room, about 10 minutes after I arrived, I had to, for the first time, show my driver's license. It was handed back to me with a white receipt on which the poll-worker had drawn a yellow magic marker line. She told me to go to the yellow line.
Immediately suspicious, was I being sent to the yellow line because I was a woman? Because I looked over 55? Because I was white... I studied the green and orange lines (each with about 10 people) and could find no obvious "lumping" by demographics. The captain of the yellow line gestured to me....I asked her...why was I yellow? She responded, "because we have 5 lines, each a different color, and we open them as needed depending on traffic flow." "The crowd just got bigger, so I opened the yellow line, and you are the first one in it.".... I felt pretty foolish. The county ballot was absurd, one page for the voting and 4 pages of small printing (once in English, once in Spanish) of each of the tom-fool amendments our legislators sought to burden us with. I finished in rapid order and inserted each page into the machine, got my sticker (above) and walked out.
Whole process, 20 minutes. Effort?.... priceless.
GO VOTE!
2 comments:
Good for you!!
I went the first day our early voting opened. I've had to show my DL for quite a few years now, so I never really think about it.
I had to laugh at your suspicious nature, though. And there you were just getting a prime spot in line! :)
Nothing wrong with having a suspicious nature.
What if we all still had to vote on the same day???????
I would stand in line all day if I had to, but I'm glad I don't.
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