On voting: 2014 Midterm election

It’s not often I blog about politics. It’s just not my thing, but I will this time.

Tuesday I got to participate in my first US election as a new US citizen. Went early in the morning to the voting place (even managed to not get lost too), which was an elementary school. It brought back memories of elections back home when I was in elementary. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere near the gym (on pain of death!…or at least a severe chastising… well, more like a shoo-ing away by the grown-ups, but when you’re 6 is there really any difference?) because there were secret things going on (or so I thought…nobody ever told me it was for voting).

The voting process was pretty painless. Only a couple other people were there to vote when I arrived. I showed my voter registration card and ID at the check-in table, they looked me up in the laptop and gave me a yellow card which got promptly taken away by the poll worker who set up my voting machine.

The voting process was pretty simple and the buttons on the screen were large and hard to miss. You either have to have really fat fingers, or the touch screen calibration has to be really off to mis-register a vote.

I made my selections (7 screens worth) followed by 3 more screens worth of verifying my selection, a warning screen telling me I hadn’t filled everything out, and finally a confirmation screen. (Make your selections. Are these your selections? Are you sure? Really? OK.)

Then I was done. Another poll worker handed me an “I voted” sticker and off I went to get the rest of the day started.

So now that the Republicans have a majority in both the House and Senate and have governors in a lot of states, there’s a lot of Republican swaggering going on and broad brush painting by pretty much everyone.

Will be interesting to see what happens in the next two years.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.