Like a lot of people, I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching the news. At this very moment, I can distinctly recall describing nine different elections as “the most important election of our lifetime.”

The nice thing about a phrase like that is really, everything you’re doing ought to be the most important thing you’re doing when you’re doing it. It’s just broad enough of a phrase to gather in a whole host of sentiments, and try to wrap them up with something we marketers often call “urgency.”

I think (and talk) a lot about this idea, but this election was a little different.

I didn’t get my ballot in the mail.

I really haven’t gotten anything in the mail lately, so I suspect it’s probably a broader…mail…problem, but to be completely honest, I just figured no one had anything worth talking to me about and didn’t think twice about it.

I was kind of excited. It ended up taking about two minutes.

While there, I figured I’d try my hand at one of the tablet app voting machines.

iPad on a table in the booth with a printer. Poll worker pops in a ballot ID that matches to your precinct and you get a rather grey looking UX where you must-tap-in-the-center-of-the-box for your vote to count. Whole thing took maybe fifteen minutes.

(For comparison, I think I spent an hour and a half with my primary, mail-in ballot.)

A lot of the ballot initiative text was completely incomprehensible on a tablet screen. A weird mash of typefaces, sure…but really, just not on par with modern mobile first copy.

There’s not really much the people who make these interfaces can do, as there’s some established culture/rules about how things get presented, but it was kind of curious to notice. Each machine returns the number of ballots printed, and it looked like there were separate collection points for the different ballot types so you can know how many people are impacted, but I worry that the conversations we’re having about electronic voting are still too early on to start thinking about the experience at this level, but I don’t think that means it isn’t worth paying attention to.

All in all, a relatively uneventful experience–which is exactly why it’s so important to vote.

Happy E-Day, Y’all!