I voted. It was okay.

Just before I walked out the door this morning to go to my polling place (in the old folks home—er, retirement community—next door to the condo) I got a text from my fiancée, who noted that up where she was (in L.A.), the lines were around the block. This was at roughly 8:00 a.m., an hour after the polls opened.

Down in my neighborhood in Long Beach, it took me a total of 12 minutes to complete my voting transaction. And that includes walking to and from the polling place (which, as noted, was only about 40 yards outside the front door). I did have to wait a couple minutes to sign in (there's always someone who has difficulty with being able to state his or her name, and the people behind the table almost always struggle with finding the names on the list, even when you spell them out), and then after getting my ballot I had to wait another few minutes for a booth to become available. Once in the booth, it took me approximately a minute to punch the holes for the candidates and propositions on the ballot; I did spend some time prior to getting there identifying how I planned to vote, so it wasn't terribly challenging. When I went back to the person who collected the ballots, she commented "That was fast." I smiled politely. She tore off the stub from my ballot and handed it to me. I asked if I could have an "I Voted" sticker, and she said, "Oh, sure," tore off two of them and gave them to me.

On my walk to the train station I passed another polling place (in a church rec room about four blocks away). And there I could see a line of people waiting that was at least as long as the distance from my front door to my polling place. None of those people would be in and out in 12 minutes, that much was certain.

My experience with my polling place has been the same every time I've voted there since 2004, whether voting in the morning or evening. It's always as relatively quick. But clearly that's not common.

Now, I do not believe that the people working at that location are intrinsically more efficient than people working at others. (They aren't necessarily hideously inefficient, but to call them a "well-oiled machine" would be a stretch.) So why were there so many more people waiting at that other location?

Well, conceivably more people who were assigned there chose to vote before work. The retired don't need to worry about hitting the polls in time to get to the office. Or maybe more of the people over on my block were of the percentage who don't vote.

Or maybe the answer was implied by what the woman said to me about the expediency of my voting time. Maybe the people at these other locations are making up their minds when they're in the booth, without having done the research ahead of time. If a majority of those voting are taking up the available booths for considerably longer than it takes for those at the check-in area to process the folks, they'll just hold up the line outside.

So maybe the people on my block who bother to vote are also more inclined to make up their minds ahead of time.

Maybe the people at other polling places, where there are long lines, liken the process of preparing for voting to sitting on a jury, where one is supposed to withhold judgment until all evidence has been given. And that would apparently last until they get in the booth.

Hey, perhaps they figure they're giving all the people waiting in line time to read the sample ballot.

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Remember: Less than half of eligible voters actually do so. Thus, if you voted today, you're in a minority, and therefore an elitist.