Good luck guys, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you!

We'll do our best. The really, really early results look promising for the candidate most of the world is probably pulling for.

Thanks for two fingers and not just one.

I'll do some crossing of fingers as well (toes too if it helps) in hopes that all the states that matter do their part to put Obama in office.

I can't fathom why/how someone would vote Republican right now, but I also couldn't believe GW made it in the first time and then got propped for a second term. Definitely the two most epic fails of the past decade.

Well, I voted down here in Florida (Broward County). New optical scan system in use. Fill in the circles and feed the sheet into the reader. No confirmation, just that the ballot was read and no blanks or double votes were scanned. The machine did have a printer built into it but us voters got nothing.

Polls opened at 7:00AM I got there at 6:45 and waited for about 1 hour before I was given my ballot. There were tables set up for about 30 people to fill in the ballots at a time. Only two optical scanners were visible. One seemed to be only for use for those in a wheelchair as it wasn't used at all while I was there. The line at least in the morning wasn't too long about 50-70 people in line.

I voted Obama/Biden.

Umm remember that here in the UK we use two fingers to salute

Cheers

Cris

As well I can't understand why voting Republican seem unfathomable to democrats. Being a republican I can understand why someone would vote for the democrats. I see the democratic point of view however I just don’t agree with it.

I lived in Ft. Lauderdale for about a year. Seemed like everywhere I went I was standing in line.

I just got back from voting. In and out in 10 minutes. It's good to live in nowhere land, sometimes.

Because we can't find any Republican policies that have stood the test of time. Also, many of the stated platforms are disingenuous or contradictory. Especially, in both cases, Republican economic policy.

It was about trickle-down economics. This didn't work, and produced one of the largest redistributions of wealth in US history, conglomerating in the upper class. It was about reducing taxes and reducing government spending. But under Republicans, taxes are reduced, mostly on the upper class and businesses, but spending continues to increase. It was about reducing regulation, but that only ever ends up creating a crisis. (Do I really need a link for this one?)

The social policies I (vehemently) disagree with, but understand. But many "technical" policies, the economic ones in particular, have been shown to simply not work.

Party politics and affiliations aside, you're telling me that you can look at the candidates and their running mates with an objective eye and still come out leaning toward McCain/Palin?

How many conservatives have already publicly endorsed Obama? I can't see a McCain vote as anything but sadomasochistic. It's either a vote to try and screw with someone else or asking for a second helping of a relentless beat-down.

I also hope the US has a higher turn-out than Canada did last month. We had only between 56 and 59% of eligible voters come out. Pathetic. But what the conservative party was hoping for when they called the snap election in the first place.

To restore some (of my) faith in the US population, I'd like to see a 9 to 1 margin of victory for Obama. But I still don't trust that there isn't any voting fraud in the US electoral system. It's the only way I can honestly believe GW won the past two.

It will probably be a lot closer than that, unfortunately.

I am glad to see that a few states outside the Urban Archipelago are going Dem this election, though. It's the only thing saving us right now.

I was going to reply to this and say what an interesting commentary it is on the entrenchedness of US political positions, that people are talking of a 55%-45% victory as a "landslide". That sounds actually like quite a close election to me, and I dug up some UK figures to provide a comparison -- only to find that even the landslides of 1987 (Tory) and 1997 (Labour) were only slightly more dramatic at 58%-42% (of those who voted for one of the two main parties).

Peter

It's almost impossible to have a 9-1 victory given the US electoral system. I'm curious to see how the popular vote will turn out in addition of course to the numbers that count.

Your story is consistent with lots of other stories. A one hour wait isn't that bad, all things considered. I'm guessing the bottleneck wasn't at the scanner but rather with either the check-in desk or with the number of voting booths. Certainly, scaling to more booths is very straightforward. Scaling the throughput of the check-in desk is much more complicated.

That printer is for the end-of-day tallies. The only sort of receipt you could ever get would be a "thank you for voting" sort of thing, unless we start getting into the more sophisticated cryptographic voting systems, but nothing of that sort is offered for sale, much less certified for use.

Exactly. There were only enough tables set up for 30 people at a time. There was a short line for the scanner itself, but that varied. It all depended how quickly people filled out their ballots.



Why is that? What would be wrong with a short printout that just gave you list of your votes? As it stands today, I don't know how the machine read my ballot. I just got a thank you for voting after each sheet I inserted into the machine. It didn't seem to matter in what order you inserted the sheets. I don't even know if you needed to insert all of the ballots. I guess I could have taken a few of the ballots with me...

Because we do the secret ballot, to prevent situations like this one.

Because as soon as you get a receipt you can be coerced into voting a certain way and be forced to prove it with your receipt.

Absentee ballots are kept with their envelopes until they're ready to be counted, so they can be thrown out if need be. Polling placed mix all ballots together so there's no going back.

The optical scan machine is simply a convenience. Your registrar should be doing a manual count of a random sampling of the ballots, and any close race should trigger an automatic hand recount. On top of that, any candidate can chose to pay for any hand recounts they want of the actual ballots, not the optical scan machines memory card.

Makes sense I suppose.

But you could add a shredder to use after you review your votes.

I guess I'd just feel a bit better with some sort of review of how my ballot was read by the machine. This just boils down to a matter of trust in the end.

Some of the newer optical scan systems, not yet certified for use nationally but used in odd corners like Florida, have a full-blown screen on them to display the scanner's interpretation of your vote and even have headphones for blind voters. Our research suggests that voters would be unlikely to catch any scanning errors. Once you allow the possibility of tampering, then all bets are off. The machine could show you who you legitimately voted for while recording the opposite.

Not speaking about any of the current candidates in particular, but just about the party platform in general.
There is a dawning realization among "intellectual conservatives" (esp. several prominent newspaper columnists) as well as among those who classify themselves as independent, that the "Republican Party" in office in recent years actually holds to very few of the "traditional" Republican party planks.
In particular:

• Small Government
• Reduced Spending
• States Rights
• Isolationist Foreign Policy
• Personal Privacy

These have been traditional positions of the Republican party, but you can see that the huge budget, giant growth in government agencies, nationalization of the banks, refusal to let California go its own way on some environmental issues, two wars overseas initiated by the U.S., and the rampant loss of personal privacy all go against the traditional stated goals of the Republican Party.

You might argue that the only truly consistent "Republican action" taken by the Bush administration in the past 8 years was cutting taxes.

"Republican" and "Democrat" are really just marketing brands at this point, and are basically a continuously varying hodge-podge collection of positions on various hot-button issues in order to try to garner 51% of the electorate at any given time.

Regardless of the results of this election, there will be a major internal re-evaluation by the party and some serious navel-gazing of exactly what "Republican" means after this election of a far larger magnitude than even that of what the Democrats did in 1994 after the Gingrich-led "conservative backlash."

Yeah, agreed. I remember back when I was a kid, when the choice between republican and democrat was about the things you listed, as opposed to the "morality" issues the republican party has made themselves about today.

Do you really think so? Really? On a national level?
I'm afraid that studied introspection is very low on the list of priorities for the shepherded masses. One can hope...

I'm not entirely understanding why there are such long lines. I helped my dad vote this morning, and we were in and out in 5 minutes. I then voted with my wife this afternoon, and we didn't stand in line a single time and were also through in about 5 minutes. My mom also went at around 7:30 and got through in around 6-7 minutes. Apparently there were really long lines at my parents' precinct when it first opened, but since then you could just walk in at any time.

Regardless of outcome, I'm very happy with the voter turnout this time. In my parents' precinct, by 10:30am they'd already had 588 voters, and there were already 500 absentee ballots. That comes out to much more than half of the precinct, and it was only the middle of the morning.

Of course, when I say "regardless of the outcome," I also mean "if Obama doesn't win I have no faith in my fellow Americans."

Just got back from voting, after a lot of confusion on where to vote. First, some quick background for this story:

Austin proper sits in two counties. Travis county is where most of the city is, and also the size of the city results in it occupying most of the county. Williamson county includes a small piece of Austin, several smaller towns that are part of the general Austin area, plus lots of sparsely populated areas. Travis county tends to lean Democratic, and Williamson Republican.

I live in Williamson, and went to vote at my local polling place, a fellowship in a warehouse building. Out front in the grass area facing the street were many political signs for Republicans running for various offices. Going inside revealed 4 people running checkin, 16 places to fill out the paper ballot, and one electronic voting machine. The paper ballots were read by an optical scanner machine, and no method to cover the ballot when putting it into the machine was provided. There was usually a guy standing right near the machine to assist people, and votes could clearly be seen by him.

Once I got to the registration desk, I handed over ID to allow them to search for my name. It wasn't in their book, nor their computer, and they didn't have an explanation. During the primaries, the same issue came up, and it seems my voter registration was never processed when I moved from Travis county to Williamson. The people at the desk recommended I try the old location once more. As I headed out to my car, someone had parked outside and was putting up a few signs for some local Democrats, along with an Obama sign.

So, I drove 10 miles to my old polling place in Travis county, a high school that was a few blocks from where I used to live. The only signs out front were "Vote Here" signs. I got inside, found 4 people here as well working checkin, and 4 electronic voting machines. They tried to look up my name, and didn't find it in the books. The lady at the registration desk then called the election judge over, and she called the county to check my status. I was marked inactive after the primaries, due to signing a statement about moving and reregistering in the new county. The election judge provided me the phone number to the Williamson county voting office. Upon leaving, one of the poll workers told a young man coming in with a promotional pamphlet for some local Democrat that he had to throw it away. When asked where he got it, it was revealed someone was standing outside handing them out, and poll workers went outside to ask them to leave. The people handing out the pamphlets were also putting up signs, that they took down before driving off.

I called the Williamson county election office, and they confirmed I should be voting where I had been earlier. So I drove back, past all the Republican signs, and noticed the earlier Democratic ones were missing. I went inside again, talked to the same registration people who once more confirmed I wasn't in their system. This time however, they had me go wait in line to talk to the election judge there. He called the election office, and they recommended having me vote on a provisional ballot. I was handed a large envelope to fill out my name and address on, along with signing to indicate I hadn't voted anywhere else. I was then provided a ballot, and a smaller envelope to put the ballot into once done. I was sitting at the same table as the judge, and he took the larger envelope to fill out some information on. A few moments later, he asked if I was done voting, and I responded by asking if he wanted me to do so right there. His response was yes. I had to use my hands to cover up who and what issues I was voting on prior to folding the ballot up and putting it in the smaller envelope.

Really a frustrating experience overall, and really interesting to see the radical difference in polling centers 10 miles away from each other, both in the same city, but 2 different counties.

Wow.. perhaps the USA really does have a need for independent election monitors. Their presence might prod the local officials into more proper behaviour at their stations. Or not.

Cheers

Studied introspection? Perhaps not, other than the aforementioned columnists.

But if the Congressional races end up being really lopsided, the RNC is bound to at least say "how come no one voted for us?"

Depends on how complex the ballot is. In California, my mail-in ballot was accompanied by a magazine-sized booklet that was, if I recall correctly, more than 100 pages, and was necessary to understand the complexities surrounding the many propositions on the ballot. SWMBO and I, working steadily in tandem, each of us filling gaps in the other's knowledge, took the better part of an hour to make our decisions (not always the same decisions, either!) and mark our ballots.

Some of those issues were important, like a constitutional amendment (California's constitution) to ban gay marriage, or a law requiring parental consent before a teenager could receive an abortion, or a 10 billion dollar high speed rail system that will almost certainly cost twice that.

So, yes, I can see why in some cases there could be long lines.

tanstaafl.

The only reason for the long lines it them, unlike you, who won't take the time to fill out the sample ballot. With that in hand, marking the ballot is quick.

Election coverage has officially jumped the shark.

On CNN right now, Wolf Blitzer is interviewing one of the other CNN correspondents. Except, he's not, he's interviewing a "hologram" of her. They're basically projecting a hologram-like image of her in front of Blitzer as he interviews her.

The 3-D pie charts were gratuitous, the 3-D images of the Capitol building were excessive. 3-D "holograms" of reporters? Ridiculous.

Update: