Voting in California is a little different.

The polling place is at some neighbor's house. In our neighborhood, Aunt Carol and Uncle Charlie hosted voting in their living room.  They had some sort of radiant fan contraption on their wood stove that required no electricity, and I couldn't figure out how it worked.

Aunt Carol checked everyone in and another woman gave you your ballot, based on the party to which you belong. It's a scan-tron sheet, which you take to a booth where the ballot key awaits. The key identifies the numbers to fill in on the scan-tron (i.e. bubble 101 means yes on prop 91; 103 = no on prop 91).



When you're done, you take the ballot to Uncle Charlie who feeds it through a reader that counts the votes and stores the paper record. He tears off the stub as a receipt, so I could track my vote record from the number on the ticket, but it's still anonymous to anyone else.

I voted for Ron Paul, not because I ever want to see him as president, but because I wish the party would get back the libertarian streak it once had. A vote for Paul could push it in that direction. I've always seen primaries as a time to let your party know the direction you want it to go, so I always go for a candidate with a snowball's chance in hell who has some out of the ordinary tax reform ideas or libertarian views. Had I registered a Democrat, I'd have voted for Obama.