Just voted for the first time in twelve years that I didn’t use an absentee ballot–very exciting. I was in line by 6:05 and out of the booth by 6:30, but there were already signs that the monitors and police were surprised by the crowds. (Things were a bit confusing, but I don’t really blame them. The space is tight, and it was probably hard to work out exactly what traffic flows would be until they started.) This is probably familiar to anyone who hasn’t lived abroad for a while, but I found it oddly touching to be standing in line to vote in a school corridor, harangued from all sides by posters about punctuality and attendance and ordering class rings.

Like a lot of people, my first experience of democracy was our mock vote in first grade for governor of Pennsylvania, complete with cigar box and squares of lined paper. (Dick Thornburgh was running against some guy named…Flaherty? Flannery?) I hope Miss Cramer’s happy that the lesson stuck. The church I was brought up in–if I haven’t mentioned this–frowned on voting in national elections. God has plans for the United States and the world, see, and you could be voting against Him.

Just imagine trying to explain your way out of that one on Judgment Day.

Polls are often wrong, but if they’re right, I won’t be happy with the results today. That’s the way these things go. Both viable presidential tickets well and truly bit this year, but fortunately, Washington is not largely controlled by the president alone, and the states are not largely controlled by Washington alone. Whoever wins is unlikely to wreck the republic. It just remains to see who it is.

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