I Can Haz Ppr Ballots HEART!

There were voters there at 4:45 in the morning when we got to the polls (our precinct always gets most of our voters in the morning and then thins out by lunchtime) but I don't think anyone who showed up after the polls opened actually waited for more than an hour. Being able to have both the paper/optical scan and the touch screen as options was a godsend-- we could send ten or twelve voters over to fill out their paper ballots and not have a huge line for the machines. And then it trickled down and the evening was dead. Our 7 pm rush was about four people. Didn't escape the polling place until 10, and then I went with my mother (and my father, who was driving) to return the ballots, machine tapes and various election materials to the government center, so it was a 20 hour day by the time I got to sleep. But other than that, not the problem we were afraid of.

We had very close to 2/3 of our 3K voters turn out, including large numbers of people of *all* ages who had never voted before, and possibly as many as another 300 of us voted absentee. And let me just say that I am very proud of Virginia for throwing over our reputation for deep-south crazy Republicans; as someone who's spent far too much time in Northern Virginia, I feel like I've heard all my life about this shadowy "rest of the state" that elects creationists to the state government and supports people like Pat Robertson. This is the first major election I've lived here for where I felt like there was actually a point to my voting. (not that I didn't do it anyway, but still... in the 2000 election, every race I voted for went the other way)

I have learned:

*kept at indoor temperatures, my thermos will keep tea *almost* too hot to drink for 16 hours.

*All those years of educational system brainwashing about how to fill in scantron bubbles were LYING to us. When we took the ballots out of the machine at the end of the night, there were people who had marked X through the bubbles next to the candidates of their choice, and they still read just fine. Actually, I am delighted by this, since it means there were that many more people who didn't have to void out their first ballot and have one of us painstakingly explain how to do it again (usually in a language they didn't understand very well.) The paper ballots worked FAR better in terms of having to coach confused voters through the process than the touch screen ones.

*standing up all day in squishy shoes leaves the fronts of my thighs aching terribly, but everything else pretty much fine.