11/5 Oh damn I didn’t expect this. Big rush of emotion as I walked into a US polling place for the first time, and my eyes may or may not have gotten a little wet.

It’s a school gym and it very much feels like a school fair. People walking around everywhere, some sitting behind desks, doing mysterious things. You have to check which is your voting district and go to the corresponding desk where they check who you are. I did not need to show any document, just answer: first three letters of your last name, first three letters of your first name, address. The woman looks that up on a tablet, gets my voter record that matches the information, asks me to sign on the tablet. Then I get my ballot, which is a huge folded piece of cardboard with the actual ballot inside. I’m supposed to go to one of the privacy booths to open it and fill it out. The woman gives me the hint that if a candidate’s name is printed in multiple columns, I must only select one of them. This is fusion voting, I later learn, specific to New York, and very confusing. I wonder how many ballots turn out invalid because of it. There are little ovals on the ballot I’m supposed to fill completely with ink. I guess if you grew up in America with all the multiple choice tests in school you are kind of used to this – for me it is still new. The guy next to me checks a lot of things on his phone while filling out the ballot, and I ask him to confirm whether I’m really supposed to select just one of the candidate columns. As I leave the voting booth I do not know what to do with the ballot, which I’m now holding enclosed in its privacy envelope again. Knowing only German elections, I assumed I’d have to drop it into some kind of box near the exit, but that’s not the case, the people at the exit point me over to the counting machines on the other side of the hall. This is where I take the ballot out of its privacy envelope and feed it into the machine, which shows on its screen that the ballot has been counted, and it has now been dropped into a padlock-secured box underneath the screen.