Voting in the North Carolina Primary

Tuesday was the primary vote in North Carolina. It usually doesn't matter what we vote in terms of presidential elections. For once, though, it did. People came out, it was reported, in hoards to vote. Stories of two-hour waits for advance voting abound. There were lines no matter when you went to the booth.

Maybe that was the case for early voting, but it certainly wasn't the case when I went to vote at 6 p.m. today.

I headed toward my voting place at the Lincoln Center in Chapel Hill with some degree of trepidation. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a very political town, not the least of which because people like John Edwards hail from here. With the added disadvantage of not being able to vote prior to getting off work, I was sure that there would be quite the line. As I have lived in Chapel Hill since 1998 and voted in every election since then, I'm not sure what I was worried about. But those stories had me concerned.

Driving up to the polling place at the Lincoln Center, there were almost no cars in the parking lot. It is not a very large parking lot, but it is confusing to get in and out of, so I was doubly surprised to have no traffic issues getting in. We parked the car and pulled out the Equality NC guide. My partner copied down on one sheet of paper those people who Equality NC had deemed worthy of our vote while I copied down on another.

Although we had planned to counteract one another's votes since neither of us could decide, we had both independently changed our minds about a week ago to vote for the same person for the Democratic presidential candidate. So we chose that person (who shall remain nameless, provided I can keep pronouns of out this) along with those that Equality NC chose. Although we both research the elections a great deal prior to the actual day of elections, this invariably happens. We sit in the parking lot for two minutes, frantically copying down the Equality guide and choosing other candidates almost at random. It's not actually at random, since the research that went into it has not been forgotten. But those carefully constructed candidate choices of a couple of days ago have flown out of our heads.