2008 Post-Election wrapup.

I seem to recall having written a post-election wrapup after the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, but, to be honest, I'm very tired at the moment and haven't really been all that interested in checking my files. If I did do a 2006 wrapup, then this is my second such recap. If I didn't, well then you're in for something new I guess.

Why am I tired? Well, I worked the polls on election day. No, not the poles. There's not a really big market for watching an approaching 40 pasty white overweight male strut his stuff. I'm talking about the election polls. I work as a poll worker during each election here in New York. Primaries, congressional mid-terms, presidential general elections, I'm there. And it's a long day. In New York the polls open at 6am and close at 9pm. Poll workers have to be there at 5:30am to set up, and we don't usually leave until close to 9:30pm after cleaning up, counting the votes, and locking down the machines. I have never seen a line of people at 9pm requiring us to keep the polls open late, thankfully. But it's a long day.

I was expecting a large turnout, and that's what we got. At 5:30am there was already a line of people at our doors. Again, something I had never seen before. I think the news media convinced everyone that the lines would be long all across the country. Some people actually showed up carrying chairs, while others brought books to read. There were three separate voting districts in the school gym where I was working. One of them started out the day with a machine breakdown, which caused a long line to form. That same district would have two long lines during the after work rush. My district had a bit of a push in the morning hours, but nothing overwhelming.

I will tell you that we voted on the old mechanical lever machines. Those things are great. Easy to understand, not very intimidating to the new voter or the senior voter like I imagine touch-screen machines are. And I think they're actually quicker to vote on. New York is supposed to get new electronic machines for next year's votes, but at this point I don't know what kind. Personally I'm hoping for the optical scan machines, because I think those would be easier not only for the voters, but also for the poll workers, most of whom are admittedly not computer savvy.

We did have one of the new handicapped voting machines at our polling place. It allows voters with all kinds of disabilities to vote if they can't or don't want to use the regular machines. It accommodates blind people, deaf people, and, I believe, even people who are paralyzed, though I'm not sure exactly how it all works. They train people separately for those machines. There were three people staffing that one machine...and they got not a single vote on the thing. Mostly I think it was because people didn't know about the machine, but also because they told people right off the bat that it would take anywhere from 20-40 minutes to vote on the machine. So they need to work on that.

When I left for my lunch break around noon, about 35% of registered voters in my district had voted. Granted, my district consisted of just over 950 voters, but in the primary and the last congressional election, I don't believe we got that high even by the end of the day. When I left for my dinner break around 5pm, we had reached around 60%. And at the end of the day, we finished with close to 70% of registered voters having voted on the machines. This does not take into account absentee ballots or voters who voted by paper affidavit ballot, and I figure there are still people on the voter rolls who have passed away or moved out of the district but had not yet changed their registration, though I don't believe those numbers would have skewed our percentages much higher.

Most of the voters in my district are registered in one of three ways: Democrat, Republican, or Blank (meaning they did not choose to be affiliated with a political party, or at least that's how the board of elections saw things). My own personal observation is that we saw a pretty equal share of both Democrats and Republicans voting, with a surprisingly large contingent of unaffiliated voters (the blank ones) also. But at the end of the day, the vote was overwhelming and tracked the trend across New York State: Obama trounced McCain nearly 2 to 1.

But I had expected Obama to beat McCain in New York. What I was concerned about was the rest of the country. So I headed home and watched CNN and whatever other news programs were covering the election (which was apparently all of them), including parts of Comedy Central's Indecision '08 coverage. Obama had a clear electoral lead, but I still wasn't wholly convinced. At least not until 11pm when the polls on the west coast closed and all of the networks projected Obama as the winner. It was amazing. I watched Jesse Jackson with tears running down his face, imagining that this moment was what he has fought so hard for all of his adult life and the utter joy that he must have felt being able to see an African-American president in his lifetime after having struggled so hard for so many years.

As I write this a few days after the election from my seat on the Long Island Rail Road as I head to my job in Manhattan, I can tell you that there is a noticeable lightening of the mood around NYC. People have a sense of accomplishment at having helped usher change into the White House, particularly in the form of the nation's first black president. I'm still amazed that states like Virginia and North Carolina went to Obama. Out the window go all of my preconceived notions of America's racial predisposition. Good on ya, America.