THURSDAY AFTERNOON, Cobb County, GA
Based on what I saw today, it feels like there is a groundswell of something unusual this time around. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't feel very Republican.
Interesting experience today.
We went to our local place for early voting today, one of four locations for a county with just over 300,000 registered voters. We arrived 15 minutes after opening and the line was already a couple hundred yards long, winding around behind the building.
Our county is 80% white (by census), about 70% Republican (by impression), mostly Gingrich-loving Republican. Our precinct is about the same. The line was 90% minority voters, mostly black with some Asian and maybe a few Hispanic. The clusters in earshot directly in front of us and behind us were all first-time voters of all ages from about 21 up to the elderly.
After 15 minutes, I guesstimated that based on progress during that time, it would be about 4 hours before we'd get to vote. Mrs. A invoked her right to affirmative optimism and so we waited as long as we could. Two hours later, when we were about halfway there, it came down to a choice between emergency-rescheduling one or even two of her clients or coming back tomorrow. It turned out she didn't have the clients' phone numbers with us, so that settled that question.
Progress was amazingly slow. In this county, I've used manual punch card ballots, optical scan ballots, and touch screen machines. The line went fastest with optical scan, because there could be an almost infinite number of inexpensive booths for filling out the ballot. The slowest by far has been touch screen, because they're expensive and failure-prone, meaning there is the smallest number of booths at each polling location.
I don't know whether anyone was aggressively challenging Democrats and Independents. We didn't get close enough to find out. We don't live in an area that would have been targeted ahead of time for suppression, since it's so heavily Republican. But with the advance voting turning out so heavily Democratic (yes, judging from conversations around us, the line was at least as heavily Democratic as it was minority, and probably more so), who knows if there was an impromptu slowdown by poll workers. I've never, ever experienced a voting line this long or moving anywhere close to this slowly.
So Mrs A rescheduled her sole Friday appointment and we'll go back with raincoats, golf umbrellas and folding chairs, and we won't leave until we've voted. (At this rate of throughput, Tuesday is out of the question because she'd never get to work by noon.) Friday is predicted to be the busiest day, but it's also predicted to have rain. We figure if it rains, that'll cut down on the crowd and we won't have to wait as long -- maybe only a couple of hours.
I'm really curious to see what this turnout means for the final results. It seems nearly inconceivable that Democrats could win the national races in our county or our state, but I'm telling you that finding Republicans in that line was like looking for jujubees in a bag of popcorn.
I'm also very curious about what kinds of auditing our state uses for touch screen voting and I think I may look into that. One would hope that at the very least, they check the number of votes recorded against the number of voters receiving an access card. I would also hope that they do some statistical analysis within each polling place to verify that outcomes are very similar for all machines there. But you never know. These election people can't be all that smart if, after all the (scathing) professional analyses of the reliability and security of the Diebold machines (which were NOT developed by experts in secure computing), the elections dept still thinks they're all but infallible.
Based on what I saw today, it feels like there is a groundswell of something unusual this time around. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't feel very Republican. I'm not holding my breath for Democrats to take any national races right here, but this trend may be part of something big that will tip the scale in other parts of America.