I have some major problems with voting in Louisiana, and I am wondering if anyone else has to go thru this same process. I stand in line and wait for an 80 year old woman with an oxygen tank to take my voter's registration card and license. Then she looks up my name in a binder and it takes her 1 minute 14 seconds to find it. (I clocked her because I watched her help the people in front of me and it was getting ridiculous)

There are 2 other people sitting at the table with her, and she then proceeds to call out my name to the woman sitting next to her, so that she can write it down in a spiral notebook. She says my name twice out loud and then spells it out, and even though she has all my documents, I still have to correct the spelling of my name. She then hands me a pen, and tells me to sign next to my name in her binder. The third lady at the table does nothing.

There are 3 voting machines there and no one is in them. There are two men standing on either side of the voting machines, also doing nothing. I walk into a voting booth and make my choices. By the time I am done, the guy behind me is just walking into one of the booths.

I have major problems with a few things here. Why do we have such slow old people handling this voting process? Each one of these booths should have been filled. I mean, come on! I could have found my name in about 4 seconds, the binder was only about and an 1 1/2 inches thick and was alphabetically tabbed for her convenience. Also, here she is calling out my name! I don't want the 35 people behind me knowing who I am. I should have the right to vote without having all these people know me by name. And what is the deal with the spiral notebook? Who gets this book, and what is it used for? Lastly, wtf is the third woman doing or what about the two men? Shouldn't they be handling maybe L-Z or something? Split up the binder and get another notebook or some shit. If I had the day off I might not have even worried about it, but of course we don't have a national holiday for Election Day and our absentee voting closed like a week ago. Even if it hadn't I couldn't use it because you can't do it on a weekend.

I can't even begin to bitch enough about our new voting machines. They are somewhat confusing even for me, and I am educated and pretty savvy user of technology.

Anyone else have a similar experience, I am interested to know?

I had a problem with locating my name at the polling site, even though I went through a lot of trouble making sure that I would be able to use one of theose wretched machines instead of those fireplace-fodder paper slips they make you fill out when they don't have their sh*t together and make you wonder if the government has erased your existence from their data banks! But we know that's not true, b/c they'll want their beloved tax money sooner or later. I feel like the voting process is designed to be incomprehensible to some in order to discourage the act at all. It is much the same way they treat other social programs. If you've ever had the misfortune of applying for unemployment, then you know that getting it can be almost as difficult as landing a new job. Bottom line is, they don't really want you to do it- it's just there so they can say its available- to pay lip service to the system they boast about having in place to other nations.

Mine was easy beasy. No line... walked in and out. I think a lot of people on my side of town voted early. I tried voting early twice but the line was longer than I could wait.

Out machines are old school. Fill in the bubble with a black pin then feed your ballot into the machine. Like taking tests in school.

girl you are so HOT!!!! I GET GOOSE BUMPS JUST READING YOUR POSTS!!!! IF YOU MOVED UP HERE WITH ME VOTING WOULD BE EASY AND I would learn how to take the Caps Lock off. And I would make sweet love to you every night and you could have my babys !!!!

My polling place was in the garage of the house next door to mine. I vote first thing at 7am so I don't deal much with lines but it was the busiest I've ever seen it. We use good old scan trons like ricky. They do the spiral notebook thing though. I've never seen anyone but incredibly old people working these booths, I guess because able bodied people don't volunteer.

I didn't really have a problem with the voting process--we had the big binders and the voting machines, but the registration process was a pain. I moved to Virginia this year so I registered to be a Virginia voter twice starting in August but the DMV kept failing to get it to go through, so I took a few hours of vacation time from work and drove 2 hours to and from my polling place to vote.

I think I will volunteer to work the polls next time because we always have ancient, arthritic people at ours too.