Voting in America is so entirely backward. I’m not talking about the people (though that may be the case after today as well)… I’m talking about the process. We are, for now, still the world’s most technologically advanced place on the planet and yet when I go to a polling place, I am handed 5 huge, cardboard-like ballots. I am instructed to connect arrows with a felt pen and then I feed these ballots into what looks like a garbage bin (the picture above is what I attempted to feed my ballot into this morning).
The bin inevitably jams sending poll workers scrambling for how to open the monstrosity with the only key to it dangling around the neck of woman who sounded as if she was simply stating robotic messages… “error, we must now use the auxiliary bin, error we must now use the auxiliary bin.”
This is no way for us to participate in what for me is perhaps the most important day of the year. Today I voted for a ballot prop in the city of San Francisco that would extend voting to Saturdays and would allow day-of-registration. We are doing lots of good things to enable more people to vote. The least we could do is give them a simple, straightforward, 21st century way to register their opinion.
