We had a line of enthusiastic voters starting around 6:15 Tuesday morning. People braved the thunder and lightening, ready to do their civic duty, all in the name of Team America.
One of the best parts of election day was the sheer volume of first time voters who came in. We celebrated as many as we could. First time voters are such a treat! We high-fived them, clapped and cheered them along. Other voters stepped up, congratulating the new voters. Our new voters weren't just young adults, we had folks as old as 78 coming in for the first time to vote.
Sadly, we also had several who tried to game the system, giving us the same talking points of how it was legal to register and vote on the same day. Or better yet, how they knew they were registered, even though their name wasn't showing up in the system. Those folks couldn't tell us when they registered or if they'd voted in other elections. And--every single time--when we offered to call the courthouse to find out why they weren't in the system (because it does happen more often than it should) they all bolted. And my favorite: we had the ones who lived in Arkansans, were registered to vote in Arkansas (so they said) but insisted they always voted in Texas.
For the most part, everyone was friendly and kind. Someone even brought us bottles of water! Nobody wore candidate merch Tuesday. However, there was a larger than necessary faction of voters who wanted to take selfies, or pictures of their ballots, or talk on the phone and process the entire voting experience with their best friend.
At the end of the day, we had 750 voters. To put that in perspective, during the primary we had about 500. I got home at 8:30 and managed to arrive before Buckaroo, whose site had significantly less voters. I went to bed, not having the least bit curiosity about what was going on with the the outcome of the election. In the morning, I found a plethora of play-by-play text messages from Polly, who stayed up watching the results.
No comments:
Post a Comment