voodootim

my voting experience. i showed up at the polls early yesterday morning and waited in line with the masses. when i finally got up to the front i was told that i was not in the register...oh really. it was finally determined that when i changed my license that my address did not get changed to my current address with the voting registrar which is in a duval county. i was instructed to call clay county and see if i was still in their system. so i called. i was told that they wouldn't even look it up because if i live outside of the county it is a felony to vote there...ummmm okay. i went outside to the protect your vote people who were extremely helpful to my plight and hooked me up with a lawyer. i was instructed to go to clay county and see what i could do there. so i drove 35 minutes south of jacksonville and was again told that it was a felony to vote there and i should go to the clay county supervisor of elections. when i got there, another 30 minutes south by the way, i was told that i couldn't vote anywhere, that i had missed the deadline and there was fuck all i could do about it. the woman here was horribly rude. so here i am a registered voter and i've been turned away from 3 voting booths....so i start back to jacksonville. we get halfway back and i'm livid about the situation so i call the duval supervisor of elections office...again. the woman told me that they should have let me vote there because my address change wasn't more than 3 months old but that i could go to the duval supervisor of elections office and they could give me a provisional ballot. so i go...and i wait...and they tell me that i can fill out a provisional ballot but that if i'm not registered to vote in duval county it will be thrown away. so i walk back outside to the protect your vote people AGAIN who by this time had several of their own volunteer lawyers there. 2 young lawyers helped me out immensely and got me an audience with the actual supervisor of elections. so i find out that when i changed my drivers license and told them i wanted to change my address for voting purposes that it doesn't go from county to county and i should have been instructed to fill out a separate change of address form for the duval supervisor of elections, which i was NOT, the woman at the dmv told me it was all taken care of. if i had changed my address at a duval dmv that it would have been fine. so i walk back outside to discuss my options here with my new found law friends. at which point i might add i was surrounded by media. one woman actually had the audacity to ask me, "can i ask you who you are planning on voting for?"...to which i replied,"no, no you can't"...if you want to right a story about me fine but it's about the system being fundamentally flawed and will NOT be turned into a sensationalist story about one party trying to turn away another...so to wrap this up i ended up filing out a provisional ballot and filling out an affidavit that i swear i am who i say i am and that i have the right to vote. these ballots will go in front of a canvassing board who will decide whether my vote will count today. i can call and see if my vote counted in 5 days....this is funny because florida has already been called. a relatively close call at that. so i guess the moral of this story is that sometimes every vote doesn't count. i tried like hell for 6 hours yesterday to make mine count.