As for myself: Burlington was as efficient as ever. It's actually one of the things I'm going to miss about this town -- they take great pride in elections as a part of civic life, and run them well. The whole town votes in the High School gym -- there are six tables in the front for the six wards, and each table has two people marking folks off in the books. Each table has fully 20 voting stations behind it, so you feel like you have time to read the whole bloody ballot instead of being rushed. The lines were all of 3 people deep.
The ballot questions made interesting reading. Question 3 (medical marajuana) was an easy Yes, even if it doesn't go far enough. (I still see no reason to treat pot differently from alcohol and tobacco -- it should be legal and highly regulated.) Question 1 (right to repair) keeps being a head-scratcher for me, but that's partly because I'm offended that a law is even necessary -- this *should* just be standard practice, and I'm appalled at the auto industry that it isn't.
Question 2 (right to die) was the interesting one. There have been a lot of claims in the past week that it is vague and poorly worded, and should be shot down on those grounds -- I found the truth to be quite the opposite. As described on the ballot, it's a pretty nuanced and well-thought-out law. There are probably flaws (no law is ever perfect), but it does seem to cover all of the usual objections I've heard to assisted suicide, and generally comes down on the favor of appropriate caution. It looks like a unusually *good* law, if anything, nicely balancing individual freedom of conscience with the need to avoid abuse. So that one also turned out to be a surprisingly easy Yes for me, and I'm forced to conclude that the opposition is mostly trying to play a disinformation campaign.
So, points to Burlington: they still run the best election-day operation I've ever come across. Other towns really should check them out, and see what ideas they can pick up...
I voted early because I was going to be doing campaign work on Election Day (one of the few reasons we're allowed to here in VA); the lines at my polling place were over two hours from the moment the doors opened at 6am until about noon. Part of that was because of heavy turnout and most people wanting to vote before work, but part of it was also because they were using electronic poll books to check people in, and one of the three machines failed for about an hour in the morning, and a second one was down for a shorter time.
There seems to be no good reason not to use paper for that function (and we do in a lot of elections.) I usually go with "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice," but the governor appointed notorious voter-fraud propagandist Hans Van Spakovsky to our county electoral board, so I think there's a reasonable chance there was an intention to cause delays.
Even when we didn't have a bozo like that running things, voting gets a short shrift in local budgets. We finally got the option of using paper ballots in 2008, and then we didn't have them in the next legislative elections because printing the ballots was "too expensive" in the depths of the recession. So it no surprise we don't have more voting machines, either.
It's not clear to me what made this election different here: some people had been voting in this precinct for 30 years and had never seen a wait longer than 5 minutes. I got the same story all over Cambridge and Somerville.
It's cool that what you had worked for you, it's just not obvious to me that there's a lot there that was working in your favor other than 'lower volume'... with substantially the same system, the wait for me to vote was just longer.