1.5 mile round trip, 15 minutes going - voting - home. Should be like this everywhere.
Polling place the usual: Lutheran Church hall, right in our neighborhood. Plenty of volunteers, plenty of booths, lots of paper ballots and a box to put them in.
For pete's sake, how hard is that to put together?
A volunteer sitting at the door asked my name (no ID required) and checked it off the roll. Another volunteer directed me to the person with the book for me to sign next to my name and address. My husband's name is next to mine, already printed is: Absentee Ballot. Another handed me my ballot and a Sharpie pen. I went to one of the abundant booths (made of paper and plastic), took out my sample ballot, and marked off every name and proposition, took it back, dumped it in the box, got my I Voted! sticker and a smile and left.
The ballots will be counted by Scantron, and if there's any dispute, they can be resubmitted and/or hand-counted. There is a paper trail.
I could go on, but really, the point is that if you WANT votes to matter it doesn't take expensive hackable electronic machinery -- or much machinery at all. All it takes is the old-fashioned determination to get people in there and give them the simplest possible tools.... and apparently a bunch of laws with teeth in them so that these things are provided rather than withheld. 
Hekate
Santa Barbara County, California
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