iLikeBlue

I’m Florida

I voted in the recent presidential primary. Go ahead and applaud if you’re a fan of voting. In case I’ve lost you fans of apathy, please note this was the first one I’ve bothered to get off the couch for.

My local polling place is at a rinky dink elementary school in the middle of a field. The sign in table was staffed by two little old ladies who spent their time chatting instead of effectively explaining how the process worked.

There were two lines, each line had it’s own volunteer little old lady (or L.O.L. if you will). One line was for Republican and one was for Democrat. Since the only voting experience I’ve ever been a part of required you to sign in according to how you were registered, and due to a shameful past, I ended up signing in on the Republican side.

By the time I realized that I had indeed just signed up to vote Republican in the primary, it was too late. By “too late” I mean, I was already handed half a pink index card and in line to use the touch screen briefcase voting-ma-jiggy.

That’s right, you have to stand in a line, for one machine, holding a color-coded card so everyone has ample time to silently judge you. I’m not sure which is sadder though, the shame I felt being duped into getting a pink card or the horror that only one lady in the entire line had a blue one (and she was also the only non-white person). Go ahead and draw conclusions about where I live. It won’t take long. I’ll wait.

I get up to the voting “booth” which is basically an opened briefcase, with rickety thin-metal legs. Another volunteer inserts my index card into the machine. I’m not sure if the machine can read colors, but there wasn’t anything else on the card to distinguish it from the blue cards. If the machine is smart enough to recognize colors, then I wonder why it was so stupid when it came to the actual candidate selection process.

First I had to confirm that I was ready to vote. I’m pretty sure I had to press about 3 buttons. “Ready to VOTE?”

“Are you SURE?”

“Voting in … 3…. 2….. 1″

“Press here to confirm and enter voting sequence”

I guess they want to get their money’s worth out of the touch screen. A paper ballot would never be so arduous.

The pink card tells the machine to only offer me Republican candidates. The machine but not be up on it’s current events, though, because the choices for the next Republican Presidential candidate include such drop outs as Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mitt Romney.

I pounced on the chance to make my vote worthless and pressed the space next to Mitt’s name. An icon appeared where I had touched. That icon was a bright red X.

Now, to me, a bright red X symbolizes “WRONG” or “ERROR” or “one strike on Family Feud.” A bright red X is not the symbol I equate with “Vote accomplished!”

Initially I figured this was the machine’s final way of telling me what a waste of time my outing was. Maybe it was smart enough to know that Mitt had already dropped out of the race? Sadly, no, a friend of mine who voted for a valid candidate said he got the same red X and had had the same reaction.

Still, it’s hard for me to criticize the machine too much. After all, I’m probably one of the few people who can legitimately say that my vote on Tuesday did not count.