I Voted Today

Yep, this is the first time I voted in my adopted country. I was excited to vote because it’s one right I had to work for(tons of paperwork).
We walked down to the polling place because we expected the parking spaces to be full and would rather avoid the confused drivers too. While waiting for my turn, I was trying to figure out where do they keep the data(votes). I was expecting a local area network set-up with one machine to receive/store the votes but looks like each machine had a hard drive which will be detached and be placed on locked ‘ballot’ brief cases. It would have been good if they had a printer to make a hard copy back-up in case the drive fails. Hey, I’ve worked long enough with computers to know that they can fail when you need them most.
It went pretty smoothly(considering that I misplaced my voter’s ID, I just brought a letter from the Board of Elections as proof that I am a registered voter) and we didn’t wait long for our turn. We used a touch screen computer for casting the votes. I was expecting to pick the governor, vice-governor, senator but there was a whole bunch of other positions to be filled and some amendments of laws that I had to say yes or no to. That made it confusing, I’m sure that the average voter would have been too.

Oh well, I voted for the people whom I knew would be good for Maryland.