The polling place: A sick-old-folks home. It smelled like sickness and looked like a run-down hospital. I've only ever voted in churches or by absentee, so this polling place is by far the worst I've ever been to.
The line: Short, but it was early and the voting took a long time (see below), so it moved slowly.
The voting method: Optical scan. Good. Still, I prefer NYC's old-school mechanical booth, with all the flip-switching and lever-pulling I grew up with.
The ballot: Really long. I had to vote on retaining every judge in Cook County, which took forever. There were three ballot initiatives I had read nothing about: banning .50 caliber guns (no), increasing the minimum wage (yes) and pulling out of Iraq (dumb, but yes). The three-member board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District ran unopposed, so I considered voting for my friends, but I decided against it for fear of spoiling the ballot.
The candidates: Shoe-ins. The Democratic primary is over.
"I voted" stickers: None. That sucks. No purple fingers either.
Historical note: The first politician I ever voted for was Bill Bradley, in the 2000 New York Democratic presidential primary.
No on banning guns? Bad liberal.
I got to my suburban polling place at 6:20 am, expecting a long line. We were third in line and even by 7, when polls opened, there were only maybe two dozen people waiting. But the voting machine appeared to work, even if I have no proof that it recorded anything. Still, it took the nice but elderly poll volunteers a good while to figure out how to look up voter registrations on the newfangled computer machines.
Eeh, the battle for gun control is over and they won.
You're turning more mid-western by the minute.
Maryland only lets voters outside the US vote for the federal candidates, so I didn't get to vote for O'Malley.
To my great shame, the first person I ever voted for was George W. Bush, 1998 Texas Republican gubernatorial primary.