I voted today...

Beautiful new voting booths

I voted today, and I feel free of the heavy weight of the 2020 election.

LA County has brand-new easy, touch-screen voting booths, so it was fun.

They print up a paper record at the end, and the voter gets to look at it and approve it.  Then it slides into a box for storage.  

So much better than the punch machines with their hanging chads, and better than fitting a numbered ticket over two prongs and then stamping a black circle on the ticket to match the candidate's name in a booklet.

Voting has been open all day since Feb. 21 with virtually no lines, close to my home.

I don't like mail-in ballots because they don't get counted on election day.  I want my vote to count from the beginning.

I was surprised by the sense of relief I felt to have my primary vote cast.  I voted for Amy Klobuchar for president.  

All at once the election was over--I could stop watching the anxiety-making coverage.  

Voting was at Olympic High School on Lincoln at Ocean Park Blvd.

 I parked ten feet from this sign, walked in, voted, and was done--less than 10 minutes from getting out of my car to climbing back in.

 Here's the cool touch screen.

I even put on the microphones and listened as the candidates' names were read off to me for each office.

I always enjoy seeing all the other languages that a citizen can use for voting in Los Angeles--everything from Armenian to Korean.

Long live freedom to be different--long live immigration.  

And afterward I got a red, white, and blue sticker saying "I voted!" in thirteeen languages.