Early Voting

Bryan and I did early voting today.

We were planning to wait until election day, but got spooked by the anecdotal reports from friends about the length of the ballot (we have 12 state-wide initiatives, plus the national and local elections). An hour was the average length of time it seemed to take if you read through and thought about the questions.

Looking at our schedule for Tuesday, we realized that we didn't have that kind of time to spend. I have to be at work at 7 am, so we couldn't do our traditional first thing in the morning voting (the lines are pretty short first thing in the morning). And we didn't want to have to leave it to the end of the day.

So we took advantage of California's early voting option and voted today. I assumed that it would be easy to do, because who else was going to drive into a remote part of San Jose to vote on the Sunday before the election? Turns out, a lot of people did just that. We got there a little before 1 pm and took a 90 about minutes to get our ballot.

And we were lucky. If we had arrived 5 minutes later, we wouldn't have even been allowed to go straight inside. The started having people queue outside, since there wasn't enough room inside anymore. The woman in charge told us that they had over 1000 people vote just that morning. I was really impressed at how smoothly everything ran.

I'm relived that our voting is done, although I'll miss the sense of civic camaraderie that you get when you vote on election day. I am saving my "I voted" sticker to wear on election day.