So yesterday was Election Day, and hopefully everyone reading this (in the US) exercised their right, regardless of party affiliation. Those who know me well are probably somewhat familiar with my political leanings, and I count those on both sides of the aisle as friends. I am not here to start a political debate, so no need to rehash whose name I filled in on my paper ballot (no messed up touch screens or hanging chads here–just black ink filling in little round circles–really difficult to screw up the CT ballot–I’ll give them that).

Now on Tuesday I nearly had the opportunity to do the inconceivable, vote TWICE! That’s right, kids-you heard me right. The phrase “Vote early and vote often” nearly applied to me!

Long story short, we had a dilemma with a UPS delivery that severely dampened our moods. A brand new sofa was supposed to arrive between 2-6pm (I worked from home), but it didn’t arrive, and UPS wasn’t much help on the phone–and that really upset us. We’ve been waiting five weeks for this sofa, because it was handmade, in the USA, and was constructed in a way that we could actually be able to get inside the narrow doorways of our home (we have a house built in 1929–you know, when people weren’t as tall and fat as we are now–I count myself in the latter–I’m certainly not tall).

The one bright spot in this whole experience was that we didn’t have to wait to vote, as there was no line at our polling station. We walked right in, stared off some girl scouts who were trying to get us to “Vote for Cookies” (VERY bad mood b/c of the UPS Screw-Up–a long story that I won’t discuss here–let’s just say that UPS might “Love Logistics”, but they suck at them).

This polling station has paper ballots, that they give you in a manila folder to bring to your little voting booth once you’re signed in (and here in CT, they do check your ID). However, lo and behold when I opened up my folder, there were TWO, count ’em, TWO paper ballots.

At first I thought one sheet was some sort of instruction, but no, there were two ballots. So I had a dilemma–do I vote twice, or do I do the right thing? You hear the stories about dirty politics, about voter suppression, fights breaking out at polling stations over who gets to monitor elections, etc., write-in ballots from dead people and I thought that it wouldn’t be a big deal to just vote twice. Yes, I briefly had that kind of discussion, the one with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other.

However, the devil didn’t get to speak to me very long. I filled out one ballot, entered it into the machine, and then handed the other ballot to one of the volunteers, who had quite the surprised look on his face. Then I walked out and that was that.

BTW, whether I had one vote, two votes, or 2,000 votes (although that’s a lot of circles to fill), it wasn’t going to change tonight’s end result, so I was happy with just my one vote, the way it should be.