My First Voting Experience

I am a newly registered voter and never really been interested in politics before so this is all new to me. It has been quite an experience. For one, I wasn’t even sure I was registered. I have tried to register at least 2 other times but never received my notification. I again did not receive my notification like the form said it would (it inidicated I should receive something back in 14 days). I did though receive a letter stating where my polling site was. The first step on this paper was to look up online to see if you were registered. Of course, it said I was not which really had me worried but I thought it might be that their search engine did not deal with apartment numbers very well. I was again worried when  the girl behind me said she received a welcome letter when she recently registered.

I decided to wake up early to make my votes since I did not want to miss any work since I am really behind. I got their at 6:30 AM. I did not get there early enough. There was at least 100 people in front of me in a line that was not moving at all. It was also entirely outside; snaked around an asphalt parking lot. Luckily I brought my ipod in case of a situation like this but I did not bring a jacket so I was a little cold in my short sleeves. It took me almost 3 hours to get through the line which is pure ridiculous. The line was even longer when I left. Here are my thoughts on this issue:

1. Do they actually look at any data for the area to see how big of a polling station they need to setup or how many they need to? The reason I ask this is that I saw two major problems. (1) Our station was divided into two wards. I did not see a single person go to other ward line so basically the 1 guy checking in people for that ward was just sitting there twittling  his thumbs. (2) the second issue was that they had my ward divided by 3 checkpoints. The A through J checkpoint had about 10 times the people in it thus why the long lines. The other lines were empty at times according to what I heard. This kind of inefficiency is crazy. This problem also relates back to the first. Shouldn’t they know that there are a ton of last names between A through J over the others? I can’t believe this was just bad timing or a coincidence. I would have needed to wait in line at least another hour if I was in the A through J line.
2. Why is there only one day for elections? Shouldn’t it be at least two to knock down the lines? Can anyone do an absentee ballot? If so, why doesn’t everyone do this to avoid the trip altogether? I saw many people leave because the lines were too long. My bet is a lot of them were not coming back. This was not very encouraging for a new voter like me.
3. Was the city basing the voter turnout based on the last election. If so, downtown population has experienced a huge boom in the last 4 years. I had one guy tell me that he has been coming here for 40 years and another one for 20 and they never waited in line. Everyone in line was wearing either a suit or scrubs. Someone would have to predict that a majority of the downtown residents would vote.
4. My last issue was that we had at least two pregnant women (that looked ready to pop), a lot of elderly, and a woman with a broken leg on crutches. They all had to wait in this long line; standing up in the cold on the asphalt. Shouldn’t they have an express line for these kinds of situations? It is common courtesy.

I did hear a couple good jokes in line:

1. Why was Hans Weinman not on the ballot? …… I don’t know, why should he be? …… He is the president of the Hair Club for men
2. Republicans are so sexy! You never heard anyone say they are as ugly as an elephant. ( I think I am totally telling this joke wrong … it seemed a lot more funnier in line)

Last but not least, I did run into a lot of people from Mizzou and Wash U that I had no clue even lived downtwon. I thought that was kinda cool.