I won’t give a minute-by-minute recap of what went on in the precinct in which I worked yesterday. It was largly uneventful and people were much happier than I expected.
I rose yesterday around 4:00am, struggled to get myself together, and walked over to the polling place—roughly a block from where I live. I wasn’t the first to arrive. One of my fellow workers was already busily preparing for the election.
The poll opened on time and we had a steady stream of customers, all in a hurry. Voting proceeded uneventfully and unlike last time all the equipment worked. We had no extraordinary problems. The touchscreen unit, in particular, was a dream.
After the polls closed at 7:00pm we started the various tasks we needed to do to consolidate and total the day’s results. As we saw the various printouts the general results were pretty clear. As expected we had a roughly 65% turnout. For this precinct that’s not extraordinary—typical for a midterm election. The precinct narrowly went for Topinka—a foreshadowing of her defeat. If Topinka couldn’t carry a precinct like the one in which I work overwhelmingly, she was obviously going down to defeat.
I only heard anger expressed twice. Once against our part-time Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and the other against the war in Iraq. The conversations I overheard and in which I participated convince me all the more that the U. S. will be withdrawing its forces from Iraq regardless of consequences sooner rather than later. That appears to be the overwhelming sentiment these days.
We were closed, tabulated, reported, cleaned up, and out the door an hour after the polls closed with perfectly balancing numbers. I can see how, if the crew dilly-dallied, it could take, say, another hour for other precincts to complete.
I’m all the more confident of my opinion about the vote tabulation in Chicago. Any precinct that reports at 10:00pm or later either had equipment problems or are engaging in hanky-panky.
