I ambled down the street to my polling place, the rec room of a condo building, at about 11 a.m.
There are no Republicans for miles and miles around, so half the booths reserved for Republican voters stood empty in both polling places.
Our polling place changes from election to election — this precinct in West Hollywood is the only one among the dozen or so I’ve lived in where this happens. The venue seems to depend on the type of election (municipal, county, state, federal) but this is the first time there have been two polling places open simultaneously — the one where I voted and another one in a community building in a pocket park next door. Not sure what, if anything, this means.

My fear was that the writer’s strike would make the polling places as crowded as the coffee shops and lunch spots have been. I inadvertently went to the park first, so I can report that both places were busy but there were no lines, which is normal.

There are no Republicans for miles and miles around, so the GOP booth stood empty in both polling places. I did overhear the poll worker give her spiel to the guy ahead of me: “You’re listed as an unaffiliated voter. I can give you a Democratic ballot or a nonpartisan ballot.” (Independents can’t vote in the Republican primary. The nonpartisan ballots don’t include the presidential candidates, just the votes for the six or eight propositions in this round.) He spoke up: “I want the Democratic ballot.

Separately, I heard Sen. Barbara Boxer tell David Gregory on MSNBC that over 1 million of California’s 6.75 million Democrats had voted by mail, most of them before the Obama surge hit the state over the past three or four days. We can expect that number of absentee ballots to double, and then some, before the counting is over.

Stay tuned.