Election Day dreams

I dreamt last night that I was at some sort of party -- a fund-raiser, perhaps -- but it was sort of the high school bake sale kind of function. And it was at someone's house. Standing at one folding table was John Kerry and his wife (though not so much Teresa Heinz Kerry as Maya Rudolph playing Teresa Heinz Kerry), and I asked someone if it would be inappropriate for me to go up to the senator, tell him I admired him, and then suggested that he leave the jokes to Al Gore.

I'm not quite sure what that means.

And then I had a mild moment of trepidation when I went to vote this morning, because our polling place was using the electonic machines for the first time. When I talked to my sister later, I told her my thoughts, and she told me that when she voted earlier in the morning, only one of the two machines was working.

"Which one was out?" I asked her.

"The left one wasn't working when I went in," she said.

"Hmm ... I voted in the left one. Seemed to work fine for me."

Let's hope so. As I was leaving, I almost said out loud to the nice attendant, "This has a paper trail, right?" They'd best have my vote in there. I wish I could see it, not that I have seen any others in the past, but still. These electronic voting machines seem to be like umpires or other sports arbiters: you only hear about them when they do something wrong. So I hope we don't hear too much about these machines in the coming days.

It sounds like voter turnout is at highs not seen in the past few elections at many places around the country. Hopefully, that means good things.