Casting a ballot

What an archaic term is "casting a ballot" these days! Travis County early voting is very busy. We prefer to vote at the precinct, one of those in high-turnout 78704, or at the Travis County courthouse. The former must be done on Election Day itself; the latter is preferred for early voting, that wonderful feature of the Texas elections system. One of the events in the recent event cluster took us farther south, so we voted at the Albertsons market on Stassney. I think there were a half-dozen voter stands, but maybe there were more. At any rate, each was constantly busy. At any given moment three people were going through the process of getting a verification code to enter on the eSlate, two had completed that process and were waiting for a machine to open up, and two or three were waiting to begin to present a current voter-registration card. When people are discussing the local retirement of the punch-out paper ballot, they often inveigh against the new touch-screen voting. These are people who haven't voted lately, since the eSlate is not a touch-screen device and is really rather fun to use. The eSlate has been recording votes in Travis County for quite some time now. What the little spin-wheel device that clicks is called I don't know, but that adds to the fun, and the screen is very easy to read, even for someone with poor vision. Votor-registration cards were being recorded by using a hand-held scanner to read the bar code. This is new. Many people are encountering the eSlate for the very first time, if one's to judge by the requests for demonstration of use. Really, though, the device is very user-friendly. It appeared that the requests for assistance were from people not acquainted with computers generally. Now I don't have to worry about being "struck down" before Election Day. It was so busy that we forgot to ask how many had voted, and it was so busy that not one of the election officials had time to make the customary comment on turnout.