Electile dysfunction.

I voted yesterday. Yay for me. 

We've been doing the early voting here in New York, but somehow we have not made the worst mistake possible -- that of sending ballots to everyone on the voting rolls. Maybe I should call it a "mistake" rather than a mistake, since it seems to have been pushed by pols who are most likely to benefit from election fraud, and most likely to be experienced in it. 

We've had a huge increase in requested absentee ballots here, including from my wife, thanks to fear of Chinese Death Virus. I went in person yesterday morning to drop hers off at the town hall, which is the polling station for early voting in person as well. It opened on Thursday at seven a.m. But there were three small issues with my plan, those being:

1) The dogs helped hold me up later than I'd hoped; 

2) The station is open to all the voters in the county, and there are only seven such stations for the 385,000 residents of the county;

3) It was raining. 

The line started at the back door of the building, snaked around the front to the other side, wound all the way around the large parking lot, and ended about ten feet before it would lead back to the road. I felt like I was on line for Space Mountain. Of course the rain had stopped when I got there, so I left my umbrella in my illegally parked car, but started again soon after. 

No matter. I said I would walk through fire and over broken glass to vote in this election, and I meant it. Every election is sold as the most important of our lifetimes, but this one seems to fill the bill. Even if the voting of our electors in the electoral college is a done deal (this being New York), the down-ticket candidate fights were of great interest with Governor Sonny Corleone making stupid decisions twice a day and three times on Sunday. 

I wish we still had these old-fashioned voting machines, though. We now fill out dots with a marker on a piece of ledger-sized paper, which is slipped into a reader that supposedly reads our votes properly. You get no satisfaction of the sort that came with the Automatic Voting Machine of the sort seen above, manufactured proudly upstate in Jamestown. Click the little switches and then throw the lever -- CLUNK! I JUST VOTED, BABY! 

Your vote had heft! No more -- all digital now, even the sign-in. But they still won't ask for any ID here. 

They won't give me an "I Voted!" sticker, either. I never knew why anyone would want to wear one of those anyway. To say, "I did my civic duty"? Or "I'm better than you"? Or "I look like someone who would vote against you, so you'd better go cancel out my vote!" Why would I want to warn you to do that?