Call for essays:On voting in America

What was it like to vote in the mid-term elections?

Did you vote last week? Whether you participated in early-voting, absentee or walked into your polling place on Nov. 4, we’re looking for essays that illustrate your personal voting experience for others. Please include the following details:

• Your location (E.G. Miami, Chicago, Columbus, Phoenix, Redwood City, etc) and whether or not you have voted previously in the same city. If you have an anecdote about voting in different cities, or different polling places within the same city, please include these details.
• How did you vote? Early, absentee, in-person, etc
• How did you research ballot prior to completing your ballot? It would be great to include any descriptions of effort to understand details of races big and small, state-wide and hyper-local, referendums, etc. Did you check for endorsements via news or political organizations? Did you look up candidates’ positions on issues, talking to friends or family about items on your ballot, etc? Did you download a sample ballot?
• If you did not do any research prior to voting, can you talk about what that was like?
• Explain the experience of finding your polling place, checking in, receiving your ballot, in the booth, voting, understanding the ballot, using the ballot, etc. What did you find memorable, confusing or delightful during this experience?
• What was it like submitting your ballot? Did the machine function properly? Did you get any feedback about what was being captured? Did you understand what was happening?
• If you recently registered to vote, was anything memorable about the experience?
• Finally, if appropriate, do you have any suggestions to improve the voting process?

Please submit draft essays for review to citizendux@gmail.com. Try to keep them to a max reading length of ~10 minutes, and please include any visuals to supplement your essay and descriptions. We will be opening up the collection of essays very soon so get your drafts, post haste.