Election Day, Part One: The Polls

I am homeschooled every other day, so I was really lucky that Election Day fell on a homeschool day for me. That meant that I got to go to the polls twice: Once with my dad, and once with my mom and Wes.

First, I went with my dad. The ballot started with the President of the United States and went down from there to the local races. I pretty much knew who my dad wanted to vote for, but on a couple of the items, like judges and referendums, I had to ask him to point to the one he wanted.

On one race, my dad wasn't really excited about either candidate. So he told me that I could WRITE-IN a candidate! It was so cool. My dad told me that he didn't care who I wrote in, but that I had to take my vote seriously and write in someone who could actually serve in that role. In other words, I couldn't vote for Mickey Mouse or SpongeBob. I won't tell who I wrote in, but the person would have been a really good choice, in my opinion, even though they weren't officially running for office.

Then, Mom checked Wes out of school at lunch and I went to the polling place again with them. At the polling place (which for us is a funeral home!), we saw former Congresswoman Karen Shephard who served in Congress with our dad (the pic to the left is us with Rep. Shephard). Then it was time for Wesley to help mom vote.


In Utah, where I live, you get a thing that looks like a credit card that you stick in the machine so that the machine knows that you are a valid voter. Then you use a touch screen to vote for the person you think will do the best job in office. So Wesley voted for mom. It took about seven or eight minutes. Not long. Then we got something for Wes to eat and took him back to school.

Since it was only noon and I had already finished all of my school work, I went to the Obama for Utah office and made phone calls to remind people in some of the swing states (I called Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Arizona) to go to the polls and vote. The list in front of me on the desk is one of the three lists I called from on election day.