Election Update

The big news of today is the huge voter turnout throughout the country, and I can vouch for that firsthand.

I got in line to vote at about 10:45 during what everyone had said was expected to be the slow part of the day. At that point the line was around the corner and down the block--and that was only the A-L line. There was a second line for the M-Z people on the other side of the building. I actually considered leaving and coming back later, but I decided it would only get worse later in the day.

So I stuck it out, and it ended up being about a 50 minute wait. When we finally got inside, we could see what the problem was: They only had two voter printouts, and there was a single poll worker handling each one. Consequently this was creating a huge backup in the line. Meanwhile, they had close to a dozen voting machines basically sitting idle. It was actually taking longer to process each voter than it was to vote once you were at the machine! They should have broken the list of names down further, perhaps into five or six portions of the alphabet.

On the other hand, this is how they handled it four years ago. But back then, the two lists were perfectly adequate and there was no line.

I should also add that while I live in a heavily Republican area (63% for Bush in 2000), there appeared to be a surprising number of Kerry supporters among the people in line around me.