The Line Out the Door
Halfway through the night, we ran out of ballots.
That was less of a crisis than it sounds. The "ballots" were narrow strips of paper. No serial number. No stub. No log of who got one. When our stack ran out, a man went downstairs for a handful of blank slips, and as he passed them around he said what everybody was thinking. The whole thing was so insecure, he said, "we could all have voted three times."
Nobody argued with him.
This was Tuesday, March 5, 2024: Super Tuesday, the biggest single day of the presidential nominating calendar. Across the country, Republicans were choosing a nominee for president. In Utah, the party had decided its voters would do it in a school, in person, in a two-hour window, on scraps of paper a man could fetch by the handful from downstairs.
That was the official presidential vote of the Republican Party in the State of Utah.
