My legal poll-watchin' day

Philadelphia's election results have been posted, though the site seems to be having (volume-related?) difficulties. (Another site lets you view results by ward and division.) President-elect Obama won 83.0% of the vote here.

The polling place where I was assigned, in Philadelphia's 4th Ward, ran like a well-oiled machine. There was a line of a dozen or so people at 6:30, when I arrived. When we opened at 7:00, the line had grown to 20 or 30 people. Two divisions were voting there. By noon, about half the registered voters had come in and voted.

When people arrived, a pollworker would ask their address and then tell them which division's line they needed to get into. That way, most people got into the correct line right away. Both divisions had split their polling books by last name, so we had four separate lines when volume was highest. Though there was some frustration in the morning, the lines were not contentious, and the longest wait, I think, was about half an hour. The voters and the pollworkers all seemed to have been well warned ahead of time for the logistical challenges, and most everybody seemed willing to put up with the delays with good humor.

Volume was the worst problem at this polling place. We had no broken-down machines, no voter suppression tactics outside, no accessibility problems that we couldn't overcome. Few voters cast provisional ballots (of which, here in Pennsylvania, only about half are counted).

A little after noon, one voter told us she'd gotten the infamous "press the straight Democratic ticket button, then press the Obama button again, or your vote won't be counted" text message. (This message is incorrect; if you do as it instructs on Philadelphia machines, you'll vote the straight Democratic ticket but no vote will be recorded for Obama.) I took her information, filled out an incident report form, and called the campaign. They pretty much told me not to bother them, kid, with such a minor problem, since my divisions were otherwise working out so smoothly. So we educated the voter, as they say, asked her not to forward the message to anyone, and confirmed with the voting machine operators that they were explaining that voters had to make sure that the light was lit next to the name of the candidate they wanted to vote for.

Earlier, I'd gotten a text message warning about the text message going around. When it got to our divisions, I felt like the secretary in Ghostbusters saying "We got one!" -- I don't want to say I was bored all day, because I wasn't, but we just didn't encounter any of the nightmare scenarios that the voter protection training had prepared us for.

We had a few little old ladies and very, very senior men. One woman who looked in her 90s came in with a walker, wearing a cap with gold sequins on it. The crowd parted like the Red Sea and let her go to the front of the line.

Many people brought their kids (we seemed to have twice as many people come through the building as actually voted.) And many people brought their cameras. People posed their kids in front of the voting machines for pictures, then brought the kids with them into the booth to show them what was going on. I will neither confirm nor deny that people were letting their kids press the "VOTE" button. I heard some variation of the phrase "let's make history" several times an hour.

Mid-morning I was asked to go to another polling place where 1 of a division's 2 machines kept breaking down. I called it in and reported it, but then I was asked to return to my initial polling place and stay put. I wasn't going to complain. The second site there had a lot of first-time pollworkers and the lines weren't as well managed. There also appeared to be a community gadfly adding some very localized social dysfunction to the mix. I had a disgruntled voter fill out a disgruntled voter declaration form. He'd been directed to the wrong division line, then the wrong last-name line in the correct division. He kept being sent to the back of the line. He was a bus driver and had to get to work, but he said he'd come back. I never heard if he did.

So, really, I truly got the luck of the draw for the polling place where the campaign sent me! I was on my feet all day and my feet and legs were killing me when I got home, but I really couldn't have asked for a better day. Well, no, I'll take that back. Though I introduced myself as being a poll watcher for the Obama campaign, I think that most of the people there thought I was from the McCain campaign. I don't think I look like a Republican. But they did tell us to wear business casual, so I wore a (thrift store) blazer, black slacks, and loafers. The situation was made clear, however, after some very brief conversation, and after I'd brought out the Tastykakes. In the end, it was more funny than anything else that anyone had tagged me for a Republican.

If I had any other complaints, maybe I would mention that I never actually met the election observer team I was supposed to be supervising. The campaign kinda scattered them all to the winds, and I was working with other people. I wonder how many other teams that happened to. But the observers I did meet and work with, at both polling places, were very earnest, enthusiastic people, mostly from out of town, who were solicitous for the voters' time and comfort (it rained a little, off and on, from early afternoon until the polls closed) and were ready to jump on any problem that looked the slightest bit like voter suppression.

Oh, and the phone numbers they gave out to report voting numbers and call in problems were swamped all day. But what are you gonna do? As I said, it went so smoothly for me that it was problematic only for a few voters when we tried to find out their correct polling places.

By the end of the day, about 65% of the divisions' registered voters had checked in to vote. Obama won literally 99% of the votes. We're not sure why the other 1% went went to Senator McCain (zero votes went to the Independent and Libertarian candidates); we figure they were so deeply, deeply social conservative that they simply couldn't vote Democratic.

Back in my neighborhood, Obama won my ward by the same percentage as he won the city overall. He won my division by a couple more points. At about 10:30 a.m., I was about voter number 400 of about 740.