election day!!!

If my precinct is anything to go by, we will have a record turnout for voters in both in terms of percent voting and in numbers voting. I live in a very rural township - and I had to wait over an hour in lines to vote. Thank goodness they moved our district from the tiny township hall (which we shared with another precinct) to a church's pole barn (which we had by ourselves). As it was, people were out the door and the line zigzagged back and forth across the gymnasium floor once you got inside. We use those forms where you fill in the bubble for the candidates you want - like you would with a standardized test for school. At the end, you feed it into a machine which tabulates the results and stores the ballots. So no voting machines, and plenty of little booth area and tables to vote at, so the line actually moved very quickly for the number of people who had shown up.

Even if we had had to wait outside, the weather is perfect here in Michigan today.Watching the news, states without early voting (like here in Michigan) have endless lines snaking out of buildings and into parking lots and streets. In Virginia they have these lines that look to have hundreds of people (if not thousands), standing outside waiting to get into their polling places, in a pouring rain.

The election workers at our precinct said that they had more than twice the number of voters this morning than they have ever had in a previous election at the same time of day.

I really hope that the new President and Congress - regardless of which party they represent - will expand early voting to the rest of the country so as to avoid the horrible lines braving horrible weather, as they are in Virginia this morning. Heck, here in Michigan it could have been heavy snow rather than heavy rain.

And is anyone else happy as heck that the endless negative political ads will be off of our televisions sometime tonight or tomorrow?