My sleeply little polling place was pretty active this morning. For whatever dumb reason I forgot to check and see what number I was. But there were four or five folks in line when I left. That's pretty heavy for our precinct.
To be clear, a lineup at the polls isn't a great sight on election day. I noticed some comments earlier that cable news commentators were characterizing long waits as a sign of a healthy participatory democratic process. That's nonsense. A heavy turnout is good. A convoluted jam up at the polling location is a failure.
Maybe this is counter to our state's conventional image but Louisiana's elections are... comparatively speaking... among the more smoothly run operations in the country. This doesn't mean there aren't problems. A good standard to shoot for is no one has to wait more than 10 minutes at any polling location. We don't always meet that.
On the other hand, our supposedly outdated voting machines don't often crash the way these did in New York today. Or like this in Atlanta. Thankfully, they are not as vulnerable to "humidity" as North Carolina's seem to be. We also are lucky in that we do not (yet) find anyone in Louisiana dealing with intimidation tactics like the threat of military exercises or confounding episodes such as the sudden overnight foreclosure of the building housing a polling place.
If you do see anything like that today, please repot it. As it stands right now, election watchers are so bored, the most serious problem they can find is a shortage of stickers.
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