We spent the morning distributing rain ponchos to voters in the Church Hill neighborhood and crossed paths with loads of canvassers and other volunteers. They'd wave when they'd see our "Vote Today" sign, or perhaps they were just waving because...
Obama volunteers are among the nicest, most inspiring folks I've ever come across!!
There was a very long line at one polling place, and reports of early lines at others, but everyone we were seeing seemed determined to vote no matter what.
On the way to our local office, people smiled down on us from moving buses, giving the thumbs up... to voting!
BUT... I came home to hear the continuing rumblings of Virginia being the new Florida. The local paper has a rundown of problems. Details after the jump.
Problems are being reported around the city as well as in the counties. Some can be attributed to volume of people and cars: traffic problems in areas of the city that tend to have traffic problems anyway, areas brought to a standstill this morning. Some fall into that maddening category of poor planning:
At Southside Baptist Church on Iron Bridge Road in Chesterfield, David Roy felt that he and other voters had no privacy. They were handed a paper ballot to fill out, then had to stand in line with that ballot. Precinct officers had some folders for voters to use to conceal their ballots, but Roy said there were only about a dozen to go around.
"I had to practically beat the woman down to get one from her," said Roy, who was voting in Chesterfield for the first time. "They really screwed up."
Some other key observations from around the region:
Henrico County:
7:29 a.m. -- Henrico voter Audrey Belford, who experienced the machine problems at Godwin, reports: "I arrived at 5:15 and was about 10th in line. When the polls opened at 6:00 I would estimate about 3-400 people were there. Of the 7 voting machines, only one was working. Apparently they are wireless and only one "found" the signal. I was able to vote within about 15 minutes and the poll officials were considering offering paper ballots as I left. If the machine malfunction were not worked out, I can only imagine what a mess it is by now."
Richmond City:
10:29 a.m. -- A voter called to say he'd been in line at Maymont Elementary School in Richmond for an hour and a half, and a poll worker just told him it could be another three to four hours before he gets to cast his ballot.
Chesterfield County:
10:54 a.m. -- Michelle Taylor, 36, estimated that she waited for three hours and 25 minutes to vote at Southside Baptist, where all votes were tabulated by one optical scanner. "I'm very disappointed in the one counting machine...If it wasn't for the extent of how bad the economy is, I'd be walking away," Taylor said.
Then there was the incident in Northside (already reported in another diary) where a librarian overslept and hundreds of people remained lined up until the polling place opened.
A number of technical problems are being chalked up to problems with damp ballots jamming the machines. No explanations are provided as to HOW they got wet and WHY this seems to have happened (or may still be happening) at several polling places, so if anyone has seen any of this first hand, please fill me in.
I'm not going to be lulled into comfort by the overwhelming desire that everything go smoothly, but in the middle of all the difficulties across the region, I have to remind myself that something beautiful is unfolding on this rainy day here in what was once the capital of the Confederacy. In the shadow of monuments to civil war generals, amid Richmond's continuing identity crisis as it tries to simultaniously worship the past while willfully forgetting much of the worst parts of it, in the middle of all of this...
There is JOY in this city. Joy, because many of us, so very many, got the chance today to move Richmond, Virginia, and the whole country toward a brighter future. Beautiful.
UPDATE: Thanks to acsguitar I read the details of a news conference on some of the voting problems and it looks like the ballot wetness was due to voters hands being wet from the rain. Still a ridiculous problem given that rain, you know, happens. But at least it wasn't a situation of all the ballots getting rained on in the back of a pick up, which is, I must admit, where my imagination went.