I voted at 3PM. I have the sort of job that lets me wander off at 3PM. There were no long lines. No telling encounters. No one said anything pithy or poignant. The volunteer flipped through the voter rolls till she found my name. "Eeeee" she said, till I picked up on the cue and helpfully pronounced it. She aligned a folder on the bottom line. "Sign here."I took my ballot. Grabbed a No. 2 pencil -- Not a No 3, thank God not a No. 3 -- and connected the arrows. I took out my iPhone and photographed my choice. I brought the ballot to the electronic reader, staffed by a volunteer. "It doesn't matter which way it goes in," he said. The machine smoothly consumed the ballot. And that was it. Ten minutes. Quick and clean and painless. Democracy as it should be, and as it all too often isn't.The single unsettling facet was the absence of a receipt. When I buy gum at CVS, I get a receipt. When I make a purchase from Hot Dog on a Stick (delicious, delicious lemonade), I get a receipt. But when I vote for the President of the United States of America, I have to trust the internal circuitry of a machine that looks like it used to party with the Commodore 64. We live in an age where our cell phones take photographs and our cameras play music and our cars have on-board navigation systems. There is no doubting our technological prowess. There should be no doubting our democracy. VOTING STORIES: I VOTE EDITION.
I voted at 3PM. I have the sort of job that lets me wander off at 3PM. There were no long lines. No telling encounters. No one said anything pithy or poignant. The volunteer flipped through the voter rolls till she found my name. "Eeeee" she said, till I picked up on the cue and helpfully pronounced it. She aligned a folder on the bottom line. "Sign here."I took my ballot. Grabbed a No. 2 pencil -- Not a No 3, thank God not a No. 3 -- and connected the arrows. I took out my iPhone and photographed my choice. I brought the ballot to the electronic reader, staffed by a volunteer. "It doesn't matter which way it goes in," he said. The machine smoothly consumed the ballot. And that was it. Ten minutes. Quick and clean and painless. Democracy as it should be, and as it all too often isn't.The single unsettling facet was the absence of a receipt. When I buy gum at CVS, I get a receipt. When I make a purchase from Hot Dog on a Stick (delicious, delicious lemonade), I get a receipt. But when I vote for the President of the United States of America, I have to trust the internal circuitry of a machine that looks like it used to party with the Commodore 64. We live in an age where our cell phones take photographs and our cameras play music and our cars have on-board navigation systems. There is no doubting our technological prowess. There should be no doubting our democracy. 
