I know I am not alone when I say that I have been anxious about voting, not least because Trump and his cronies have been trying to suppress the vote any way they can. In Virginia, for example, those of us who opted to vote by mail received our ballots last week with instructions telling us we need to complete the forms in front of a witness. This unnecessary step annoyed me, but it annoyed me even more to find out later that we did not need a witness and that this directive was supposedly sent in error. In order to feel confident that my vote would be counted, then, I realized I would need to go to the Office of Voter Registration and Elections in the city where I live and vote in person. Once there, I was relieved to see that things were well orchestrated: I “surrendered” my mail-in ballot and was directed to get a regular paper ballot instead, which I filled out and fed into a scanner. Altogether, it took about ten minutes for me to complete the process.

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