A few weeks back I went to #votefromabroad .org and requested an absentee ballot. It was all very easy. I signed my name on a blank piece of paper, scanned it in with my smart phone and ended up with a composite ballot request which was sent by email.

The ballot came by email last week and I printed it out at a friends over the weekend. Considering the attempts to sabotage the election this year, I want to get it in early.

I had been given a used scanner. After a few hours I finally got #XSane working with the PDF printer. I had a few problems because I didn’t want to save to $HOME/PDF. I had to configure cups and also #AppArmor which I didn’t even know I had. I also had problems that it was printing 16 pages to a side so it was very small. The dpi was also too low so I had to find the right place to adjust this. I feel like I always have to struggle a bit more with Linux. But there is a lot of information online and there is a sense of satisfaction when you solve the problems.

I used #pdftk to combine the pages and sent it off by email. Of course, it bounced - 550 Sender email address rejected. I will have to call them up and find out why. I think I ran into this last time and in the end used some software for the Fritz Box to send it by fax. That was still under Windows. If I need to do it this time, I think I have also successfully installed #RogerRouter but that was another struggle. 😀