Yesterday I rose at 4:00am, was at the polling place by 4:45, and began setting up. The rest of the folks working at the same precinct as I, Mary Margaret, Mary Rose, Wafaa, Lillian, Jeanne, and Michael, arrived shortly thereafter. We set up and opened the polling place on time at 5:00am.
Clearly, the various media predictions of long lines had done their work, inducing a long line where I doubt there would have been one. There were at least 50 people in line when the polls opened, a novelty that led me to believe that we’d have a larger than typical overall turnout. I was to be disappointed.
There are 416 people registered to vote in the precinct in which I work. That’s basically unchanged since the primary, changed little since the last quadrennial election. It’s a mature, civicly active area in which everyone who’s eligible to register or interested in registering is already registered. It’s what Mike Royko (who used to live eight doors down from me) might have called a high clout-type neighborhood.
20% of the registered voters in the precinct had voted early or absentee. During the course of the day we had a total turnout, including the early and absentee voters, of roughly 82%, much the same as the turnout for the 2004 election. The Democratic precinct captain suggested that, if you removed the dead people and people who’d moved away from the rolls, the actual turnout would be 90% or greater.
I don’t know if either Chicago or the area in which I live is in any way typical but, if it is, our electoral problem isn’t that not enough people both to vote but rather that we are substantially over-registered. I suspect that’s true in urban areas, generally, where keeping track of who lives where and is eligibile to vote is a daunting task.
In the precinct in which I serve and the area in which I live Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 10 to 1. Although we’re mostly of European descent (many European immigrants or second generation Americans of European descent), there are, perhaps, 5% people of East Asian descent, 5% people of South Asian descent, 10% Hispanics, and 2 or 3% African Americans. Obama carried the precinct in which I was serving by one vote.
I returned home around 8:30pm, exhausted after more than 15 hours mostly on my feet.
In my little corner of the world where Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 6 to 4, Obama won with about 52% of the vote.
That’s a great illustration of the point I was gently making: party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything.
Was there one election people were voting on in your precinct that was decided by less than 10 points. Image what the U.S. will be like with one political party and the presidental winner will be know around the time of the Super Tuesday primaries.