Great post, Ramona. Looking forward to Election Day here.

Nothing really comes close, does it?
 

Just got back from voting. Got in line a few minutes after 7am and finished voting by 8:30. Not bad for SW FL. I would say about 80% of the line was women many voting before work. It was getting ready to rain so the retirees will be out later after the rain. It is pouring cats and dogs now. My Aunt Mary was a suffergette. She loved telling stories about civil disobedience that she was a part of in her late teens. When they got the vote she was 21 years old and she never missed election after that. The 1956 convention she was helping can beans and the Democratic convention was on our black and white TV. This little 8 year old girl got her first lesson in political history. She explained to me about Strom Thurman and the bunch that was parading around the hall with the band were Dixicrats. Now here I am nearly 60 years later able to.watch his AA cousin Al Sharpton a political pundant and activist on TV. I wonder what she would of thought of that. She took me to registered to vote when I turned 21 and bought me my first cocktail that day. She made me promise to take politics serious and make up my own mind. To always vote even if there was choice between two bastards because the bastard that wins will always have to take the female vote serious. She said if you don't ever bother to vote that some day the bastards will find away to take it away. That is the way she talked and she loved ice hockey and would.throw her slippers at.the TV. I wonder what she would think about today's election. I know she would be proud of the fact that women are voting finally as a block for issues that matter more to them. It has only taken us 80+ years to get there. I know she would be here on the front lines fighting voter suppression. It is tradition in my family. Time to take nap. I have some front line duty to later today. My car is gassed up and ready to go.

Ramona,  This must be what it feels like to wait for jury to come in and deliver a verdict.  Scary, to say the least.

Great post and perfect way to start my day, appreciate.

It's funny, but when you describe voting where you live, it sounds just like here.  I will climb the stairs to City Hall, chat with my neighbors who are the poll workers and others who arrive, look over the treats which are usually a vegetable tray, deli tray and various cookies, decline the punch - then walk into the little space, draw the curtain and vote.  After I'm done, I'll go over to the little machine where Frank or one of the others is waiting to watch me put my ballot disappear into the little machine, then I'll be handed a sticker to put on my coat for all to see that I voted.   I'll go to the grocery store and since the owner is an eighty year old Repub, who will no doubt begin his anti-Obama tirade - I'll tell him to quit yelling and shut up, then give him a hug.

I'm sure in small towns, the voting experience is vastly different than in most places.  I prefer ours.  

Have a great day and hopefully I'll 'see' you here tonight. 

For me the act of voting has a kind of secular holy aura to it, or something close to that.  I am unable to vote without a constant awareness of how many people have agitated and protested and fought and died to win this right which so many decline to exercise, or exercise with relatively little thought and care, and which so many around the world do not have.  I feel slightly overwhelmed with how fortunate I am, and with how disempowered so many others aching for a greater voice in their futures, are. 

I will feel a great sense of relief upon the more or less civilized (I fervently hope) completion of today's task.  Not just because we are not going to get right now anything more in the way of difficult but necessary discussions about difficult-to-discuss, highly contentious but critical matters in this country.  But also because there is so much potential for, and actual, mischief, abroad in the land insofar as this process is concerned. 

I am revolted that we are back, in this country, to having a major political party's key strategists and wealthiest supporters working harder and more systematically than they have in at least 50 years to suppress completely legal votes, because they correctly believe they cannot otherwise win in some of these contests. 

And I am sickened that this is not all but universally known among our citizens, and that it has not yet become cause for such near-universal outrage as to produce the utter discrediting of the political party willing to resort to these means to try to win.  Holding such despicable and, yes I'll say it, un-American values should be cause for the greatest shame and humiliation.  May that not ever be who we at root are.