Democracy Unglued

I love voting.
I love, love, love, love it!

I love it so much I wish I could vote twice, but those darn polling people are pretty sharp. I'm 92% sure I would never get past them twice.  As it is, I have a hard enough time getting through the process one time.  This is because I am nearly incompetent.

I wake up excited to vote.  Yes, I'm that person.

I race out the door and down the block to my polling place.  Ironically enough, I vote in a church. Please don't tell Mike Huckabee this or I'm pretty sure he would damn me to hell twice.  Once for voting "incorrectly" and another time for voting "incorrectly" in a church. But I digress...

I race into the polling place with my very fat wallet that contains no actual money, but every receipt or scrap of paper I've ever been handed in the last 31 days which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 slips of paper.

I know the nice polling people will need to see my ID.  I know this.

None-the-less, when asked to produce it, I cannot free it from my wallet's plastic cover.  While trying to free my ID from the wallet that binds it, half of those nearly 5,000 slips of paper decide to take flight.  They float around me like large confetti while I continue to dig and scratch at my ID.  Since I am no longer in my early 30s, no one ever asks to see my ID when I'm trying to buy my boxed wine.  For this reason, my ID is permanently glued inside my wallet.

The nice polling man says I can stop my epic battle to free my ID and just show it to him through the crusty plastic.  Brilliant!  So I do this while simultaneously trying to clean up all the scraps of paper that litter the area.

The nice polling man points out to me that my license has expired.  Whaaaat?

Yep.  Two weeks prior to voting I had the audacity to turn a year older and my license expired.  Apparently this explains why my ID could not be extracted from my wallet.  It has been nesting there undisturbed since the last time I voted.

The good news is I am still able to vote.  I just need to provide a bunch of other information including my social security number which is always a fun memory game for me to play at 6:30 in the morning.

After all of that, my moment to actually vote comes.  I love it!
Absolutely my favorite part of the entire adventure!  Uncle Sam wants MY opinion!  Boy, do I have opinions!

My polling place is "old school."  No, there's no hanging chads to worry about.
Just me, my lady parts, my ballot, and a black pen.  I carefully color in the oval spaces next to the candidates I support.

Then it happens.  Why does it always happen?
I start to have flashbacks to all the standardized tests I've failed as a youth.  I mean, come on people, there is a reason I have a liberal (no pun intended) arts education.  It's not because I nailed the math section of the SAT.

Suddenly, I am not 100% sure if I want to vote yes on Issue One or not.

Yes.  No.  No.  Yes.  Crap.

Now I'm forced to read the fine print.  Did I mention how much I hate story problems?  I look around incase my neighbor's ballot will offer me a clue it will come to me.  As I look around the polling place I realize, not for the first time, what a great country this is.

There I stand.
I'm with my lady parts, a wallet containing no money and a plethora of recyclable confetti, an expired license, and a nearly unglued state of mind.  All I have are my opinions and a desire for this country to do well in the next four years and beyond.

Despite all of my obvious inadequacies, I have a voice. I have the right and the privilege to vote.

God Bless America!