My Voting Experience

Yesterday, I voted. It was an unusual experience for me — not because I don’t normally vote (I do normally vote), but because this was the first time in a long time that I had seen a line ahead of me. And for the first time in a long time, I was going to vote for a candidate that I wasn’t very comfortable voting for — that would be Senator Hillary Clinton.

There are a lot of reasons why I don’t feel comfortable with Clinton (her earlier support of the Iraq war, her corporate ties, her refusal to consider raising the social security cap) but there are even more reasons why I don’t feel comfortable voting for Barack Obama either. I guess in the end, I was more comfortable with Clinton than Obama (see Lambert for some reasons, which I agree with). And let me add that there are many good reasons to like both candidates, and I’m sure that in the general election, I will support whichever one wins the Democratic nomination.

But in the voting booth, I saw John Edwards was still on the ballot. He was my preferred candidate, and even though he has withdrawn from the race, I cast my vote for John Edwards, thinking that in some small way, votes still going to Edwards would cause Clinton and Obama to adopt more progressive positions.

This was also my last time using New York State’s old lever style voting machines. Next year, we get an electronic device to count our votes. A discussion of these devices is here and here, and the security of these devices remains very much unclear. Unlike the lever style machines, where I was 100% confident that my vote would be properly counted, I have no such confidence in the electronic voting machines. Let’s hope that in the next year, much is done to increase the public’s confidence in the electronic voting machines.

As an aside, the two people ahead of me on the voting line both insisted that they had registered, but their names were not on the list of registered voters. I’m not siding with either the Board of Election workers nor the people ahead of me, as I don’t know who is right. But the woman ahead of me said she was “pretty sure” she was registered and “pretty sure” she had voted before at this location, and I walked away wondering how someone could simply be “pretty sure” about such a thing. Either you did, or you didn’t. It’s not something you are likely to forget.