Voting in the North Carolina Primary

Tuesday was the primary vote in North Carolina. It usually doesn't matter what we vote in terms of presidential elections. For once, though, it did. People came out, it was reported, in hoards to vote. Stories of two-hour waits for advance voting abound. There were lines no matter when you went to the booth.

Maybe that was the case for early voting, but it certainly wasn't the case when I went to vote at 6 p.m. today.

I headed toward my voting place at the Lincoln Center in Chapel Hill with some degree of trepidation. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a very political town, not the least of which because people like John Edwards hail from here. With the added disadvantage of not being able to vote prior to getting off work, I was sure that there would be quite the line. As I have lived in Chapel Hill since 1998 and voted in every election since then, I'm not sure what I was worried about. But those stories had me concerned.

Driving up to the polling place at the Lincoln Center, there were almost no cars in the parking lot. It is not a very large parking lot, but it is confusing to get in and out of, so I was doubly surprised to have no traffic issues getting in. We parked the car and pulled out the Equality NC guide. My partner copied down on one sheet of paper those people who Equality NC had deemed worthy of our vote while I copied down on another.

Although we had planned to counteract one another's votes since neither of us could decide, we had both independently changed our minds about a week ago to vote for the same person for the Democratic presidential candidate. So we chose that person (who shall remain nameless, provided I can keep pronouns of out this) along with those that Equality NC chose. Although we both research the elections a great deal prior to the actual day of elections, this invariably happens. We sit in the parking lot for two minutes, frantically copying down the Equality guide and choosing other candidates almost at random. It's not actually at random, since the research that went into it has not been forgotten. But those carefully constructed candidate choices of a couple of days ago have flown out of our heads.

I gathered up our daughter and we all trooped into the polling place. There was far from a two-hour line, and we walked in. The only wait came from a woman who had not voted in some years who did not know where she was supposed to vote. She was the only person in front of us. By the time she was done figuring out where she was supposed to be (not at the Lincoln Center was the upshot), there were about 3 people in line behind us.

The same volunteers work every election. They have all day shifts, though I did not quite catch why. I suspect a lack of volunteers is what mandates that, though I'm quite sure that some people would stay anyway because they want to do so. We gave our names and address and signed our names to verify that we knew who we were.

Although stickers come at the end, my daughter got a sticker ahead of time for her patience, though she neglected to show any of that patience once we got over to the booth. She played with her "I Voted!" sticker for all of three seconds before she squirmed away.

We went to the two booths at the end, which are not and have never been anything fancy. Just glorified desks with tall blue sides, the "voting booths" are less designed to assure actual privacy as to give the illusion of it. We spent the voting time passing the child back and forth and letting her throw away the plethora of pamphlets we had received on our walk up to the polling place in a nearby trash bin. Apologies to those who were kind enough to hand them out, but they come too late for us and provide not enough information about the candidates. At least in our case, our decision is made in that frenzied two minutes in the car or beforehand, not by the abundance of signage out front or the pamphlets and earnest campaigners that accost voters as they enter the building.

Once we had completed voting, which always feels eerily like taking a standardized test in grade school, but with less certainty that anything you do actually matters, we slid our ballots into the electronic counters. There I did see an actual difference between this "historic" election and others. Whereas we usually vote at the end of the day and see that there have been less than 100 voters, the machine read that the polling place had catered to over 250 people by the time we got there. That makes me feel good. It's becoming uncool to vote, and that's a shame.

This time, an interesting thing happened. Normally I leave a polling place feeling deflated. I always feel that our votes do not matter. But this time, it's easy to feel like we matter, although we'll have to see if it's just the super delegates who matter ultimately.

Barack Obama won by a landslide, at least in the reports at 7:30 p.m. Polls were not even closed and the first reports of Obama as winner were trickling in, so it was a definitive and absolute victory, provided nothing dramatic changed overnight. I got to model proper citizenship behaviors to my daughter and participate in something that matters to me.