by Cheryl Rofer
I can see that I am likely to drive myself crazy until tonight, checking the newspapers and other blogs compulsively. So, even though WhirledView readers aren't very talky, I'm going to start an open thread where I hope you'll share your voting experiences. I'll start with mine.
I voted early last Friday at the Santa Fe County building on Grant Street. Voting was upstairs in the courtroom, which is dominated by a colorful mural of events in New Mexico's history. The procedure was to fill out a form requesting an absentee ballot, hand it in, and then sit down in the courtroom until your name was called and you were given your ballot. Those rickety plastic voting "booths" were at the front of the courtroom. Santa Fe County uses optical scanners, of which there was one.
Things were a bit confused at the first desk giving out the absentee ballot forms, which was where you had to hand the form back in. There was only one woman at the desk, with other poll workers sort of hanging around. Nonetheless, the line wasn't too long and there were places to sit while you filled out your form, which I did and sat down to wait.
As I waited, a poll worker I knit with was helping an elderly black man in a motorized wheelchair. I waved at her, and she motioned me to come over. The man needed help in reading the ballot; his vision was limited. So I read the ballot to him and pointed at the ellipses to fill in for his choices. The poll worker brought me my ballot so I didn't have the distraction of trying to hear my name.
The man was happy to hand the ballot in himself, so I went off and marked mine.
Later, the poll worker told me that the man said that this was the first election he had voted in, and that he seemed quite pleased to have done so.