Like any other complacent citizen, I found out the night before that Election Day was coming up. Voting seems pretty pointless most of the time, but I feel like it’s one of the little things you can do to help you feel like you have a say in the world. Usually we try to do the early voting thing in order to allow us to go to different locations than just our home district, but lack of planning prevented this.

I did a search for houston voting locations and found a nice little voting locater on State Representative Scott Hochberg’s website, so I used this to find out that we needed to go to the local Baptist church to vote. This makes total sense, since everyone knows that whole “separation of church and state” thing is a fad. We gathered up the child and set out for the church passing our neighbor on the way, who was pretty tickled that people our age were actually voting.

I’m not sure how elections boards find workers for the voting booths, but it seems like they raided the local retirement home to get enough people to work the lines, since everyone who worked there was well over 60. I gave them my name but they couldn’t find me on their list, but Brandy’s name was so they started the process of getting her a booth. After not being able to find my name they tell me that I won’t be able to vote, but if I wanted to fill out a provisional ballot I could. I’m thinking this isn’t so bad, since I sure don’t want to track down and go to the district I actually have to vote at, but I decided to check and see what this meant. When asked what the difference was they tell me, WITH A STRAIGHT FACE, that a provisional ballot doesn’t count toward election results.

After a few puzzled looks and questions I get them to give up the number to the voting authority that will tell you the location you need to vote at according to your registered address, which was a Courtyard Marriott down the street, so I head down there. Apparently the Courtyard decided that they would get there workers from local schools instead of raiding the old folks home, because all of the workers there looked like they were just a few years out of middle school. I know that if I was a candidate running for office I would want surly teenagers handling the ballot process, so I guess the election commission feels the same way.

To make a long story short, I got in, voted and out in less than 10 minutes, which was a super pleasure. Go voting!