I voted today

From last Sunday's episode: Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama

This was my first time voting in Strongsville, so I wasn't sure what to expect. In Elyria, we used to use punch cards, then after 2004 moved to electronic touch-screen machines with a paper printout. I usually voted before work, and never waited more than 10 minutes.

I got in line to vote at the Strongsville library at 7:01 and was voting 20 minutes later. It took just over 10 minutes to fill out the ballot because it was two pages, double-sided, and you had to color in little ovals with a ballpoint pen on a hard, non-angled metal writing surface with poor lighting. By the end I realized it would go faster if I turned the ballot sideways to color in the oval, because the hand can more naturally fill it in vertically than horizontally. It would have taken longer if I knew anything about the dozen or so "non-partisan" judge races; I left them all blank. I had researched the state issues, and even the local ones, but not the fifty billion Court of Common Pleas judges.

Afterward, we stood in another line to insert our ballots into the counting machine, so anyone standing near me could probably see how I voted on certain races since it's not easy to obscure an entire legal-size double-sided sheet of paper. I found the whole process a little more awkward than Lorain County's system, but it was fairly straightforward and painless.

I've been waiting four years for this day, and I'm glad my civic duty is done.