I voted today!

[BillORightsMan]

Friday morning I drove to the BoE in Painesville OH to get my absentee ballot. After the flurry of lawsuits on what is and isn't acceptible forms of ID, I took no chances.

I brought with me

• US passport (with my picture)
  
• water bill
  
• gas bill
  
• last year's federal and state tax returns
  
• all my credit cards
  
• Social Securty card
  
• title to my car
  
• Cleveland Browns vendor ID (with my picture)
  
• (My DL is currently suspended, so the only thing I have is this cheesy little card hand-written filled out by the court - no picture on it, she wrote my SSN WRONG! - just the DL no. and my name)
  

I packed all of this in a big brown envelope and put on my imprinted plastic name tag (a leftover from my trade show days) and my Sherrod Brown, We Count 2006, Katz, Brunner and "Beware New World Order" pins. Figuring I'd have to "run the gauntlet" and play "Twenty Questions", I strolled in and went right up to the counter. It wasn't crowded, but there were several voters there. I told a nice lady behind the counter I wanted to get an absentee ballot and she handed me a form to fill out. (I can't say it looked exactly like the form on the OH SoS website but, hey, it's what she gave me!)

I diligently filled out the form, dotted all my i's and crossed all my t's and she came back when I was done, to check my name on the voter roll computer (I didn't see her look at the precinct poll book, which has ALL my signatures from elections past, so I guess it must be all "electrolized" on her PC or somewhere). She said I was in Precinct 3D, I said, "Yep!" and she proceeded to get me one of those electronic "voter cards". I said I'd like a paper ballot to take with me and I'd return it. "Oh!" she said, "I'll have to get your precinct's ballot then." Thinking I would get a computer card with circles to fill in (like we use for stadardized tests, etc) I was stunned to see the entire ballot printed out on paper bigger than Legal Size! WHOA! She said this is what they use now and all I have to do is use a blue or black ball-point pen and fill in the oval next to my candidate of choice completely, as she held up a half-sheet showing a "correct" and "incorrect" bubble. She then stuffed my ballot into a white envelope (which I had printed my name on and signed), stuffed that into another brown mailer envelope (marked "requires 67¢ to mail") which then was stuffed into yet another bigger brown envelope marked "Voter Documents" or something like that, along with the half-sheet about the bubbles and a notice about Issue 1 not being counted.

Funny thing, though. All this time she never ONCE asked for ANY of my ID or even cared to look at it (since I emptied the contents of my envelope on the counter when I got there, heehee.)

I filled out all the bubbles with care when I got home. Today, on my way back to the BoE I stopped at Copy Max and made copies of my ballot for a grand total of 28¢. I got there ten minutes before they closed and there were about a half dozen voters there. A different woman took my white envelope and I gave her back the two big brown envelopes to use again. She thanked me for bringing those back!

All in all, a much different experience for absentee ballot voting from years past.

I never met ANY of the people that I saw at the BoE before, so I still wonder WHY they never asked my for my ID. :crazy:

Good luck!
:patriot: