I early-voted yesterday since I will be in CA on the 4th. The early voting appears to be a big hit - an average of 10,000 voters a day in our county in last 8 days, and that should increase. Starting today, the Governor has mandated the early voting booths to be open 12 hours a day. I had a 45 minute wait outside the library polling place where 1,122 other citizens voted on Tuesday.
The process started off high-tech. Swiped my driver's license and took an electronic signature.
The rest of the process was relatively low-tech. Got a 2 page ballot to blacken appropriate oval spaces on. The flow through the candidates and the amendments on the ballot were fairly simple and the optical scanner appeared jam proof. Much as I do not like this retrograde back from electronic voting machines, our state's history of problems calls for a simpler, easier to audit and trust process.
Nice touch that county employees were handing out free bottles of water and slices of pizza. Someone joked - that's all we will see as individuals from the big bailout. And the colorful sticker pictured we all got :)
