Exit Poll-For real

I got to the polls at 6:00 am, and let an older gentleman go in before me. In New Jersey, we used to have fine, unnetworked electronic voting machines that our tax dollars happily purchased. Not this time. All voting had to be done with the unsolicited paper ballots sent to every registered voter in the state. They had to be placed in the return envelope whether you were going to mail them or not. You had to sign the envelope in multiple places. If you did not have any of that,you could be provided a provisional ballot.

Having all of that, I was then instructed to sign a paper that I was dropping off my ballot. In the pre Yellow Death days, we would sign a voter book which had our signature there for comparison purposes. Post Wuhan Flu, we apparently take everyone’s word that the signatures are accurate, as there was no way to check available to the election workers, nor, one would suppose, the various ballot collection drop boxes, nor the beleaguered county election workers. It , of course, is much easier to confirm signatures when done at the voting precinct level as opposed to the county level.

My eighteen year old daughter noted that she was registered to vote when she got her license and never signed anything but her license.

Being who I am, I essentially interrogated the poll workers to make sure they knew what they were doing, and to make sure I got it right. The head poll worker answered my questions, but one of the women was annoyed that I was asking. I get it, they are volunteers, but getting it right matters.

As is usually the case, turnout was small when I went. But, then, I live in the westernmost county in the garden part of the Garden State, and our population is nothing like the more urban portions of the state.