I'm almost disappointed: No long lines, no exit pollsters, no poll watchers, no Michael Moore cameramen, no excitement. Guess this is what happens when you live in a non-battleground state.
One lady was ahead of me, and she wasn't even a voter in our precinct. She was a caregiver for a local resident who's recuperating from a recent heart attack. It was so recent that he wasn't able to request an absentee ballot but he was, nonetheless, determined to vote that day. She brought down his driver's license and asked if there was any way she could take a ballot to him, let him mark it and then bring it back. Getting out of bed and down to the polling place might, she said, be bad for his health. "He says he's going to vote, even if he has to crawl here on his hands and knees."
The precinct workers told her they were sorry but there was no way they could let her take a ballot out of the building…especially someone else's ballot. She sighed and said, "Okay. I'm going to have to rent a wheelchair and I'll bring him here in an hour or so." (Handily, there's a place that rents and sells wheelchairs two doors down from where we vote.)
I voted. It was odd, the other day when I marked my ballot and again today when I voted, to take my attention away from Bush vs. Kerry and to focus on propositions, judges, etc. I think I voted to okay a bond issue to raise money to do stem-cell research in Indian Casinos.
On the way out, I told the folks working there I'd expected to wait in a long line. One said, "If you'd come in at 8 AM, you would have. All those people, stopping on their way to work…"
Another precinct worker said, "I'm telling you, it wasn't that. It was all those stories on the news about how you'll have to wait in line two, three hours to vote. Everyone wanted to get here early."
As I left, a man was picking up his ballot and I heard him mutter, "Wish I could cast this back in Ohio where it'll do more good." He should be glad he didn't have to crawl to our polling place on his hands and knees.