My office happens to be a polling location, and I volunteered to open the doors for the poll workers at 5:00 AM — good citizen, I.
Anyway, when I got here at 4:45 and opened those doors, there were about 20 people there, waiting to set up the voting machines. As they filed in, one young woman said to me, “I’m here to work.”
“Um, for who?” I asked.
“For the election.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just the building guy.” Then I realized — only about seven or eight of the people I let in were poll workers. The others were here to vote. At 5:00 AM.
How much you can read from the demographics, I dunno, but of the dozen or so people, all but three were African-American. They had been standing in the rain at 4:45 in the morning to cast their ballots. I don’t care how many flag stickers you have on your car, you don’t beat these folks for patriotism.
I was somewhat concerned, however, as I had heard an interview on NPR with a woman from West Virginia. She wasn’t going to vote for Obama because she was concerned that — I kid you not — if a black man was elected President, black people would start to feel superior and begin to push us white folks around. (Someone else pointed out that if Obama loses, those same African Americans were likely to riot.)
Now now, before you start jumping to conclusions, the woman was very clear to state that she was not a racist. So there you have it.
GOTV, folks.
Update: Here’s a 20-second video of the line at 6:26:
The Fray
Adam Kantor says:
The trick to early voting is to move out of the country, in my case Canada. I sent in my absentee ballot weeks ago. My only fear with voting that early was that something would happen in the time leading up the election that would change my mind.
Anon E. Mus says:
I voted in Henrico, VA. At 7am, my wife waited 40 minutes. I got there just before 8am, and was in and out in 2 minutes. Serious – I slowed them down getting my drivers license out. There were some short lines, just not for my part of the alphabet.
I was glad to see Harke running against Cantor. After that whining he did after the first vote on the 700B bailout (“Pelosi spoke mean to us, so we decided not to vote for a bill that the GOP leadership says is necessary for America. Wahhhh!), he doesn’t deserve to represent VA. And then, after mouthing ideology about fiscal conservatism, they voted for it after 120B of pork was added to it. Conservative? No. Liar.
Don’t take that as a defense of Pelosi – she is worse. Unfortunately, I can’t vote her and Reid out.
The lawn in front of the polling place was littered with 20 McCain Palin signs for every Obama sign. It will be interesting to see our poll results. Based on the signs in my neighborhood, Obama had a 55% lead in a heavily republican area.
Interestingly, an older neighbor who supports the GOP and has lived in the area for more than 3 years was purged from the registered voter list. She had been supporting the voter suppression efforts…until she got nailed by them. Now she doesn’t know how to fix it. See Jesus and the Golden Rule and Shakespear “Hoisted on your own petard” for further irony.