I voted this morning in Maricopa County, in a polling place with an older demographic (they're usually more efficient and a little nicer, lol.)

I arrived around 11 a.m. The estimate was about 50 (yes, fifty) voters waiting in line. There was a personable older gentleman explaining to the waiting voters that the scanning machines - the ones that you feed your completed paper ballot into - were malfunctioning. He said they kept rejecting ballots, and you could either keep trying or you could drop your ballot into the bin.

I waited in line for probably 45 minutes. Check-in was no problem; they machine-scanned my drivers license and it came up correctly. By the time I finger-signed on the screen, my paper ballot was printed out. It is a two-sided ballot, with most of the candidates on one side and all of the propositions on the other.

In the booths - which out here are just tall tray tables with cardboard shields around them - there were slim little felt-tip markers. They weren't specifically "Sharpies," and at first glance might look like regular ball-point pens. They weren't. I brought my own black ball-point pen and used that.

The scanning machine did take my ballot on the first try. What it did with it, or with the names I voted for, I have no idea.

Back outside, I asked the personable gentleman about the rumors that agents from the DOJ would be in Arizona polling places, among others. He said he did not know of any "but I wish they would! I'd love to see them!" He seemed to think it was a good thing to have federal agents on site. I didn't ask him why.

Also noticed almost no U.S. flags anywhere. The "I Voted" stickers have some idiotic looking cartoon character on them, not a U.S. flag as I remember seeing before.

Biggest problem I saw was those damnable felt-tip markers on a two-sided ballot. That kind of ink will bleed right through the paper and leave a mark on the other side, and then the machines will reject the ballot for "voting twice" for a candidate or proposition.

And who knows what really happens to your ballot when you slide it into that machine, or drop it into the big plastic box if the machine keeps spitting it back out.

It's bad, kids. It's bad. No U.S. flags anywhere, felt-tip markers on two-sided ballots, machines that may or may not take your ballot, and bins full of machine-rejected ballots to be taken away to some cheat-hole called a "counting center."

This is ridiculous. It's the same or worse as it was in the primaries a few months ago (and I voted at this same polling place back then.)

Hold on to your butts.