Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Voted!

I voted today; although, it was a busy day for me and we have another week to vote. Even so, kudos to FL for coming up with the early voting option.

And they changed the format or rather the method leading to the voting act, not that anything was wrong before.

This is the way it goes. We stay in line until called, just like in an airport by the ticket counters. Then we step up and hand the driver’s license. They look at the driver’s license or any other gov. given photo ID. Among other things, the driver’s license has the driver’s address on it.

The person at the desk checks the driver’s license and asks the voter what his address is. If I handed in a driver’s license with my photo and address on it, why ask? If I were cheating with someone else’s ID, wouldn’t I memorize the info on it, first? Maybe they are checking our reading acumen!?

Then also, why send voter’s ID cards if you are only going to check driver's licenses?

On the other hand, this is Florida; you know how we screw up things.

Only two issues to vote for were on the ballot: The name of the person to choose from the party you are registered in and a state resolution. I had read about the resolution beforehand, so it took me a few seconds to finish the voting process.

Then, I had to wait for hubby, and wait, and wait. He took enough time as if he were reading an entire volume of an encyclopedia. So odd! He knew about the choices. We both knew whom we would be voting for and what the resolution entailed. I kept wondering why he was taking so long.

In the meantime, standing by the door, I watched the other voters. You have the admire these Floridians. Some came on wheelchairs, some by using walkers, or others while dragging oxygen tubes. Beware the silver power, World!

When we went out, I asked my husband what he was doing in the booth for so long. For all I know, there were no flowers to smell.

He said he wanted to decipher the weird legalese in the resolution. He said, it wasn’t the legalese that gave him the problem but the way the resolution’s language was constructed. In other words…Florida’s higher powers’ disorderly syntax.

And hubby is pretty much up on legalese since a lot of it is used in his profession. “Why do they do this to people?” he asks. It was this curiosity that made him try to decipher the thing. He says, “If we have difficulty understanding it, how would the guy on the street figure it out?”

Doesn’t syntax mean the study or the system of orderly arrangement of language where it pertains to grammar and sentence, phrase, and word formation for easier comprehension?

I guess Florida’s syntax goes hand in hand with the way we handle our voting. And my hubby, the solver of people problems, needed to put himself in everyone else’s shoes…on a day I was way too busy.