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The story from the polling places in North St. Louis County–and I’m in contact with people at more than twenty polls–is that the lines were long everywhere this morning. One Obama polling captain said that when he got to his assigned poll at 4:30, there were a couple of hundred people in line. By 6:45, there were 600. At most polls, though, the lines seem to be moving well.
Just talked (8:45) to one Obama worker at one of the larger polling locations, who said that the line was about fifty and the wait was maybe fifteen minutes. Not bad.
Several polling places are OK so far on paper ballots but running out of black pens to mark them with. At one location, the Board of Elections just delivered 500 pens.
One intrepid young poll worker was faced with a crazy who worked for the church where she was assigned, and he told her she had to get off the property. She tried to explain that she had a right to be there if she remained 25 feet outside the entrance to the poll, but he wasn’t having any of that reasoning. Since he was a about six feet tall and muscular, she had to decamp to her car and he persisted in harassing her until the lawyer stationed inside the poll finally got the word about the situation a couple of hours later and told him he had no right to keep the young woman off the property. So by 8:30 she was back on the job.
…called me early this morning and told me that he had been in line for thirty minutes and it wasn’t moving.
Later I received a phone message from Clark: “These people are really screwed up.” He finally did get to vote. He waited two and a half hour to vote, of which one hour and forty five minutes was in the building.
report on voter intimidation in North County alleges?
with such a small waiting line is a highly Republican district. The lines are still an hour or more at many North St. Louis County precincts, and that’s great. It indicates fantastic turnout. And those are Democratic strongholds.
I haven’t heard anything about the report you linked to, Willy, except that the Obama campaign is set up to watch for such situations and respond quickly. Sounds like they’re doing just that.
… I checked out my poll at 6am and the lines were Disneyland/Weekend style, so I postponed my vote and did poll watching for Jim Trout and Deb Lavender at Kirkwood High School. It was pretty crowded early in the morning and then cleared up a few hours later. I poll watched from 7am-1pm and Deb’s opponent Rep. Rick Stream (R) was there for most of my time there. Obama volunteers were there, people were excited to vote. Pro-Vote was there with info on Prop B.
When I finished poll watching, I went and voted at Parkway Middle School on Baxter Rd. While waiting for a machine — I wanted to vote on a machine one more time to learn about the experience of touch screen voting — the poll worker was explaining to me the myriad ways of the data being confired and backed up, while another poll worker was adjusting a nearby voting machine, when all of sudden the whole machine and stand just collapsed in a huge crash! Someone joked, well we just lost 100 votes…
The machine was propped back up and seemed to be working, but I do not have first hand knowledge of that.
Expecting a landslide…
Byron
What is the word in HD16? Do you think Kristy Manning carries the vote?
The story, with one exception, in our part of North St. Louis County is that the polls were busy, busy, busy until about a 10:30 or 11:00. Then the rush was over and the polling monitors have been bo-o-ored the rest of the day with the steady trickle of voters. We had one poll that was insane this morning (some people waited six hours) and that place stayed busy all day and still has people in line, but it’s the exception. I think that pattern is typical in St. Louis.
No problems there today.
My cousin is in North County in Velda City where there are still 200 people in line to vote and every person coming out from voting is getting a standing ovation from every person still in line.