We went together too, for the first time.

It's rainy and grey here in Tallahassee, FL's state capital. We went 45 minutes later than Nance, hubby on his way to work and me going along for the ride around the corner, leaving the kids asleep (night-owls now 16 and 11.)

Lots of bustling sign-waving, kid voting and red-vested watcher-workers outside but inside the gym (our precinct's polling place is a big Baptist church) it was very smooth and quiet. Not a soul in line, and a whole row of perky septuagenerians waiting to help us! We use optical scan paper ballots in this county. Black pen to bubble in choices, then the voter hand-feeds the ballot into the scanner.

I was VERY fast because I'd pored over the sample ballot's Constitutional amendments at home last week, and had the two numbers in mind for bubbling "yes" without even reading the headlines, much less all the contradictory-sounding verbiage. He was familiar with the issues but not the numbers and exact language, so he had to read through them all while voting, and afterward he said it was slow going because his eyes and brain weren't quite awake yet. (Coffee hadn't had time to kick in!)

I was out and home again quicker than Nance got to the front of her line.

Whereupon I turned on local talk radio and heard that a silk-stocking apartment complex polling place called Jackson Square was having a problem with the paper ballots not feeding into the scanner. It seems to be a jam that will be "cleared" from the machine at the end of the day. So the day's ballots at that site are being secured, to be fed in in a big batch at 7 pm. Voters are invited back at that time, if they feel the need to observe their ballots being scanned in.

That's all I've heard so far. But in the debacle of 2000, our county was perfect both the first time and on the automatic recount, so I wouldn't expect any drama here.