Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. Click here for the leader of the free world. It will be too easy, too convenient, too familiar to resist. After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?

Knowing that, I'm taking a moment to reconsider the value of the polling place, of voting as a public, civic ritual. I have the sense I'm doing what newspapers do with the obituaries of important persons: composing an elegy while the people are still living, gathering up the valuable stuff of their lives, so that when someone dies, we can see right away what we've lost.

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The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. What sort of physical representation do we want to give to this most central act of citizenship? Here on one side is the browser window, looking in essence like every other Web page -- the usual form to fill out, the inevitable button at the bottom which everyone has somehow decided should be labeled "Submit." And on the other is the polling place: that slightly ramshackle affair of rec rooms and church basements and garages, where poll workers, usually retired people, run a gnarled hand down the voter roll looking for your name; that place of large purposes and small human fumblings.

At 8:30 a.m. at my polling place, there's no sign outside yet, only a 1-by-1.5-inch yellow sticky on the door that says "VOTE HERE -->." William Larry Noles, a retired man who says he works at the polls for "something to do," apologizes as he brings out the official sign. "Everything's a little late," he says.

Inside, about 10 people are already voting. Oddly, about half of them have chosen not to stand up at the rickety little "booths" with privacy barriers, but to sit at a long table in the center of the room, where they look like students at a library, frowning with concentration at the long ballot in front of them. Six of us wait in line to check in. When I get to the desk, in a minute or two, the poll workers have trouble finding me on the rolls. The problem seems to be with the way the apartment numbers are listed at my address, C307 sorting in a separate sequence from C-306 and C-308. Eventually, the poll worker, Cecilia Bulosan, finds me and I get my ballot. Cecilia is a Filipina who seems to be in her 60s; she says she's getting paid $82 for the day of poll working plus $25 for attending a seminar beforehand. Working nearby is Fred Silva, whom she describes -- shyly, dropping her voice -- as her "boyfriend." Fred, wearing a baseball cap that says, "I'm Fantastic in Dark Places," is standing by the Optech IIP Eagle tallying machine ("Proven solutions for the world of elections," says the machine's label), feeding in completed ballots. The machine keeps complaining. "Unvoted" is the message the machine keeps giving. "Blank ballot."

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