A Voting Story

I feel bad that I haven't updated my blog in so long. Poor blog. But I actually did something yesterday, so I'll tell you about it.

My roommate and I got yesterday morning and headed out to, as she kept saying, Make Our Voices Heard!

First we had to go out into the seven degree weather (but it was sunny!) and scrape off her car, since we recently got one of those charming bouts of freezing rain followed by sleet followed by snow. So there were multiple layers of frozen material with which we needed to do battle. This battle involved my roommate's ice scraper, my ice scraper/snow brush, a Kool-Aid pitcher of tepid water, 15-20 minutes of effort, and one false start when we tried to pull out of our parking lot, but then she realized that the 2-inch porthole we'd managed to carve in the passenger-side-window ice just wasn't going to work.

But then we were off to Make Our Voices Heard! We were able to correctly half-remember/guess where Middleton High School was, and drove there without incident--despite the fact that the main road in town was still gross from the snow from the previous morning. (You would think that the city workers in the greater Madison area would be pretty good, pretty on-the-ball, about snow removal on the major thoroughfares. You'd be wrong. Very wrong indeed. Have I written in this space before about how much I despise all facets of driving in this town? Because I HATE IT. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE.)

So we get to the high school, which is frighteningly filled with high schoolers, but comfortingly also filled with retirement-age voting volunteer ladies. Molly got up to the table, told them her name, confirmed her address (no ID required. Voting fraud: easy and fun!) and took her ballot to a tiny, no actual privacy, high-sided plastic desky thing. I got up to the table, told them my name, told them my address, and they told me it was wrong. They had all the digits of my street number, but in the wrong order. Luckily for me, Wisconsin has same-day registration, but unluckily for me, I basically had to re-register. They also almost didn't accept my checkbook--the only thing I had with my address on it--as valid confirmation of my address. But then a more senior voting volunteer lady overruled that decision, and I got to Make My Voice Heard!

In Wisconsin, they don't ask you which party you want to vote for, they just give you a ballot with everybody on it and say you can only vote for one candidate. This seems eminently sensible to me.

Democracy accomplished, Molly and I got back into her car, guessed how to get back home, and got minorly stuck on one of the aforementioned gross roads. We didn't have to get out and push or anything, but we did get honked at for taking too long to get through the traffic light. (Attention honker: right back at you, jerk.)

Of course, since I voted for Obama and she voted for Hillary, in a sense we went to all that trouble just to cancel each other out.

However, what's important is that we Made Our Voices Heard. And that the people who said what I did were louder. Huzzah!