On Voting...or the Lack Thereof

You guys I have a secret I've been keeping for about the last 24 hours. I've been keeping it a secret because I feel shameful and quite frankly, it's a little embarrassing.

...I didn't vote on Tuesday.

There it is. You can start judging me if you want but you need to hear me out. Here's the thing, I actually tried to vote three different times on Tuesday. THREE TIMES. All to no avail. This kills me because voting is my jam, you guys. Like, I'm that annoying person that continuously reminds my friends they need to go vote and I sometimes (read: always) take selfies with my "I voted" sticker.

I love voting so much that I never mail-in an early ballot because it's just not the same as physically going down to my polling place and casting my vote. I've voted in every election I could since I turned 18 - primary, presidential, local, gubernatorial you name it I've made sure to vote in it. Ever since Twitter created the voting/poll feature, I vote in any poll that comes up in my feed cause dammit I just wanna vote. "Who should the Suns draft as a lottery pick?" No idea but I'm gonna vote on it. "Which proposed change from the NFL owners' meeting would bother you the most?" I don't really know but yolo I'm gonna vote anyway.

But I digress. So anyway, Tuesday morning like I usually do, I stopped in at my usual polling place on my way to work only to find it wasn't there. It took a page out of Harry Potter and like some Platform 9 3/4 shiz, it just disappeared. "That's weird!" I casually thought to myself. No biggie, I'll find somewhere to go after work.

Throughout the day I get texts from both my mom and my dad sending me pictures of the lines they waited in in order to vote. "Geez, I hope there's no lines by the time I get off work" I thought to myself. I proceeded to leave work a couple hours early to not only vote but also because I was going to a spring training game with Nate that night. As I'm driving home on the freeway Nate calls me, "I'm at the American Legion and the line is wrapped around the building three times. I'm not waiting in it." "This isn't looking good," I thought as I kept driving and began praying I could find a polling place without masses amounts of lines.

The short of it is - I couldn't. I stopped at two more places and found nothing but traffic jams, hoards of people, never ending lines, and not a parking spot in sight. If this were any other normal night I would wait in these lines but I only had about an hour before Nate and I needed to leave for the baseball game. So, as it pained me - I decided to go home.

This really hurts me because as much as I understand it's not technically true, I tell myself that every vote counts - including mine, and so since I didn't get a chance to go cast my vote against Donald Trump I'm gonna feel personally responsible if he gets elected. I feel like I let my country down, you guys. Nothing else makes me feel as guilty as not voting. Eating a whole box of mac and cheese in one sitting? Nah. Drinking a whole bottle of wine by myself on a Friday night? Never. Eating all of the chips I bought for Nate before he gets to have any? Nope. But not having voted? Killing me.

So if the general election is anything like this primary - that is, if Arizona decides to only keep 60 of what was 200 polling places open (SIXTY out of TWO HUNDRED)(H8 U, AZ), I'm gonna have to just pack it in the night before and camp it out. It'll be like P Diddy (is that still his name?) and "Rock the Vote" except this time it'll be "Camp the Vote"... cause that'll be the only way you'll actually be able to vote.

Thanks, Arizona.