on numerous judges, minor elective offices I'm not so familiar with, ballot questions, etc. The sample ballot for us is available by going to the Board of Elections website and putting in your address: your name and voter registration, polling place location, and available sample ballots will pop up then (since there are 50 wards in my city, and many hundreds of precincts, each ballot can be different). I make out a cheat sheet at home, after extensive research, and then take it to my polling place and just ding, ding, ding.
We have either mail-in absentee voting, early voting at selected polling sites (it's begun already: you saw Obama voting at his old place), or Election Day voting. I still like to go to the polls on election day, but I voted early during the primaries because I was scheduled to be out of town. Haven't yet used absentee mail-in: I'm saving that for my old age!
Early voting is fine, but for me, it has two drawbacks here. My polling place is a block's walk from my house; the early voting site involves getting in a car or taxi, or taking public transit. Also, election day voting gives you your choice of paper-ballot optical-scan voting or electronic voting. Almost everyone picks the optical scan paper ballots. Because they can't have 50 different printed ballots at the centralized early voting places, you have to vote on the computer screens if you early vote (which makes sense). It's okay, but I prefer filling in those broken arrows.
They key for any kind of voting, however, is doing the research before you ever start filling out that ballot. Then it's easy.
ON EDIT: I've voted in four different states in my lifetime, and I've never encountered lines of more than 5 minutes or so, at worst. And this has been almost exclusively in densely populated cities. Perhaps it's because these were all blue states (NYS, MN, MA, IL). But still, given that I've been voting for some 45 years, it always perplexes me that people have to wait. Long ballots are an issue, but interference by authorities to slow the process down seems a bigger part of the problem.
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