Michael As everyone knows, our elections are always held on Tuesdays so people can dash from work to the polls. And polling places are by no means limited to schools or public buildings. Private citizens are also paid to clear out their garages, fill them with folding tables and voting booths, and provide staff so voters can come and cast their ballots there.
Here in California, most voters cast their ballots by mail. If you are registered accordingly, the election materials arrive at your home weeks before the election. You mark your candidates and put the ballots into the enclosed envelope. You have to date and sign it and also write your address on it. Then you put the sealed envelope into the nearest mailbox or one of the official ballot boxes distributed across the city.
I had never been inside a polling place and had always voted by mail. But since my motto these days is to put every silly idea into practice immediately, I cycled to the nearest polling place on Election Day: the garage of a detached house about 500 meters from our apartment. California famously performs no ID checks during voting, so I entered the garage and merely gave my name to two girls of about twelve who were working as receptionists at a folding table. They began searching for me in a roughly 100-page paper directory with perhaps 20 names per page.
But alas, they could not find me! No problem, said another election worker—an adult this time. I merely had to fill out a form with my name, address, date of birth, and party preference (Republican or Democrat), and then I would receive a provisional ballot. I read the form and thought: This cannot be right; I have been registered to vote for years. I told another election worker that I had again received ballots in the mail but wanted to vote in the garage just for the adventure of it. She knew that anyone who already had the ballots at home would not appear on the paper voter roll. I could go and fetch my ballots, though.
At that point I was the only voter in the garage, and the election workers surely thought I was not quite right in the head, but I did not care. After all, I was on assignment as a Rundbrief reporter, and our dear little readers demand hard-hitting stories researched in the thick of real life! So I rode my bicycle home again and fetched the papers. When I returned to the garage, no other voter had appeared, and the election workers explained that they could either give me new ballots to fill out after taking mine away, or I could fill out my own papers, put them into the envelope, sign it, and place it in their ballot box.
That is what I did, and the twelve-year-old girls handed me an "I Voted" sticker (Figure 2). I kept the detachable ballot stubs. Days later, I was able to follow online from home as my vote was counted. On sfelections.org, I had to enter our house number, my date of birth, and our ZIP code, and then I could see how far my ballots had progressed through the process (Figure 6).
It took a good week for the status to switch from "Envelope opened" to "Vote counted," and apparently my vote was properly included in the election. Hooray!