West Hartford Turnout

My town has had a few referendums over the past few months, and I've worked the polls at both of them. You know, cause that's what retired people do.

Anyway, over the past few weeks I've made friends with the other poll workers at my precinct. When I went to vote today at 1:00 I was talking to the people there and they were absolutely frazzled. One of the men actually followed me outside and asked me if I could possibly come by to help out at around 4 when they get hit by the after work crowd.

He said that voter turnout in our precinct was already over 50%. He predicted that the final tally would be around 93% turnout.

The fact that he can even make a prediction like that with a straight face is incredible. I'm looking forward to going over there this afternoon. It's going to be madness.

UPDATE: Got home a few minutes ago. I can't speak for the rest of West Hartford (much less the rest of Connecticut), but at our precinct we got just over 80% turnout. Pretty incredible. Let's hope the rest of the country is just as motivated.

We only had one problem. In Connecticut we use the big, old, honking voting machines from back in the 20's. At around 5:30 some guy came in and wanted to do a write-in vote and everybody was like "How the hell are you supposed to do that?" The Moderator, who had worked at the past 6 elections, had never had ANYONE ask to do a write-in.

The Moderator got on the phone to Town Hall and spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do it. Meanwhile this guy was sitting down being all like "I don't see what the problem is here. It's my constitutional right. I can vote for anyone I want." His girlfriend, naturally, was standing by the door saying, "Can't you just do something normally for once?"

Anyway, we finally figured out how to do it, and the guy went into the voting booth and pulled the lever, closing the curtain behind him. He stood there for a second and then called out, "Um, does anybody have a pen?"

The look on his girlfriend's face was priceless.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 2, 2004 at 02:28 PM in ReDefeat Bush | Permalink